Magical Realism as a Tool of Social Critique in Global English Literature

Magical realism has emerged as one of the most significant literary strategies for articulating social critique in global English literature. Originating in Latin American fiction and rooted in Alejo Carpentier’s idea of lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real), the mode is defined by the seamless coexistence of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the historical and the mythical. While it has been associated primarily with the Latin American literary “boom” of the mid-twentieth century, magical realism has traveled beyond its geographical and cultural origins to become a transnational aesthetic employed by writers across Africa, South Asia, North America, and the diasporic world. This paper argues that magical realism functions not simply as an aesthetic style but as a political and cultural tool of resistance that enables writers to interrogate dominant histories, question power structures, and reimagine silenced voices. Through close readings of canonical texts such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, this study demonstrates how magical realism provides a critical vocabulary for challenging authoritarianism, colonial legacies, patriarchy, racism, and caste oppression. The paper also explores how the short story and novelistic forms deploy magical realism to reconstruct collective memory, destabilise binary categories of reality and myth, and present hybrid identities as sites of cultural negotiation. By situating magical realism in a global context, the paper highlights its transcultural significance. From Latin American struggles against dictatorship to African critiques of neocolonialism and South Asian explorations of postcolonial identity, magical realism emerges as a dynamic mode that continues to shape contemporary world literature. Ultimately, the paper contends that magical realism endures because it embodies the dual impulse of aesthetic experimentation and sociopolitical critique, bridging art and resistance in ways that remain profoundly relevant to twenty-first century readers.