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Postcolonialism examines how colonial domination shaped socio-political, cultural, and economic realities, especially through the writings of authors from formerly colonized regions. Postmodernism, by rejecting positivism and absolutism, turns toward ambiguity, fragmentation, and stylistic experimentation. In this context, magical realism becomes an important postmodern form of narration, a fusion of magical and mundane. It is filled with intersections of postcolonial and postmodern issues. It enters into the everyday realm and integrates the supernatural or uncanny in order to revisit and deconstruct colonial histories and attempt to deal with the fractured, hybrid identities that the postcolonial condition has created. Simultaneously, it is also close to the postmodernism that seeks to challenge grand narratives and destabilize fixed truths. This paper proposes to explore fresh critical insights into both postcolonialism and postmodernism, offering a concise historical outline of magical realism across varied literary interpretations shaped by distinct cultural and historical settings.
Partha Sarathi Mondal. “Theorizing Magical Realism Postcolonialism and Postmodernism in Dialogue.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 901–919. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.58.
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