Critical interest in the folkloric, the Gothic, and science fiction in Latin American literature has recently grown. However, little to no scholarship has united these approaches to the irreal. While folklore studies and literary criticism have a sometimes fraught relationship, a revindication of the folkloric serves to center the local and popular. The history and ongoing relevance of the Gothic has merited growing critical attention, including an edited volume on Latin American Gothic in 2018 and monographs from Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez in 2017 and Carmen Serrano in 2019. Similarly, in the field of science fiction, foundational works such as Rachel Haywood's The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction (2011) have established a new area of research and generated critical scholarship within the broader context of Latin American Studies that has continued most recently with Emily A. Maguire and Antonio Córdoba’s Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction (2023).

While various recent MLA panels have centered on approaches to the irreal, including 2020’s “Being Folk: How Folkloristics Humanizes Cultural Processes,” 2023’s “World Gothic,” and 2023’s “Utopia/Dystopia: World Making in Speculative Fictions of the Global South,” they were siloed off. This session will bring these separate strands into conversation, like the 2023 roundtable “Fictionality and Genre,” but in 17 minute presentations that center South American texts and raise productive questions about the recent challenges facing realism and mimesis in Latin American literature.

Braden Clinger’s presentation builds from folklorist Elaine Lawless’s observation that the label “Magical Realism” can erase the popular, local, and oral, arguing that in Latin America, the tradition of performing the folkloric in literature pre-dates and exists alongside Magical Realism. As a case study, Braden will consider Tadeo Zarratea’s 1981 novel Kalaíto Pombéro as a post-magical realism neo-regional novel. The novel leverages the Pombero, a Paraguayan folk figure, to engage with the modalities of the novela de la tierra tradition while performing the cultural pluralism of rural Paraguay.

Laura Colaneri’s presentation addresses the crisis of representation facing those writers attempting to depict the political violence that plagued Argentina throughout the late twentieth century. The talk will highlight the occult as it appears in Luisa Valenzuela’s 1983 novel Cola de lagartija, Mariana Enríquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019), and the film Historia de lo oculto (2020), arguing that these texts feature the occult to address the secrecy and paranoia that characterized this period. In this way, writers and filmmakers use irreal Gothic horror tropes to depict the shadowy nature of authoritarian violence under the last dictatorship and convey how its victims constituted a form of ritual sacrifice meant to shore up state power.

Eduardo Leão's presentation will discuss Bolivian author Edmundo Paz Soldán's latest novel La mirada de las plantas (2022). He will argue that its recurring references to the country's extractivist history of human exploitation are not only reminders of the region's deeply disturbing socioeconomic formation but also a model for new types of exploitation dictated by the whims of scientists and the tech industry. The novel walks a fine line between technophilia and technophobia, exploring the incredible possibilities of the medicinal use of Amazonian flora in the near future while revisiting and updating the horrors of the region’s economic history.

By incorporating folkloric, Gothic, and science fiction elements, these novels and films offer alternative ways of engaging with a perspective that escapes the scope of more realist-oriented literature, creating their own poetics and internal logic. Ultimately, this panel will demonstrate how these genres, while historically viewed as less prestigious, nevertheless allow writers to overcome some of the challenges of mimetic representation while remaining true to the many irreducible facets of Latin American experience.