Didier Coste  (Université Bordeaux 3)
Beside Magic Realism: a Worldly Approach

A - Theses:
1) Postcolonial studies, far from evolving towards a literary-centred discipline, has increasingly lost sight of the political and ethical involvement of the literary.
2) This discipline's growing "presentism" or inscription in contemporary short-term history reflects the world view and interests of late global capitalism it was purportedly invented to fight.
3) These two characteristics, among others, make it favor a globalized canon of literary works that are amenable to irrational and archetypal readings, thus both "cultural" rather than literary and faithful to a persistent exoticist prejudice.

B - A case study : Realist realism vs Magic realism
The analysis of disciplinary discourse outlined above is well exemplified in the construction of a global and transnational corpus that artificially standardizes and promotes the mythical and modernist "magic" realism features of African, Latin American and South Asian based narrative fiction against the aesthetics and ethics of "conventional" literary realism in these same works and others conveniently tagged ethnographic, testimonial or imitative of early Western realism. Works written in European languages are also preferred over largely ignored works in native or other local languages (e.g., in India, Anand, Sethu, U.R. Anantha Murthy). Comparative readings of Asturias vs Arlt, Kourouma vs Sembene, Peter Carey vs Christina Stead, Arundathi Roy vs Rohinton Mistry will be suggested, but the list could be extended indefinitely. Even if and when due attention returns to realist realism, it is mostly for reasons alien to literary and epistemological valuation.

C - Conclusions:
In order to decolonize postcolonial studies and restore the axiological potential of postcolonial literature itself, it is an urgent priority to turn from an other-worldy to a worldly approach, such as the one offered by a renewed comparative history of mimetic forms. What is at stake, also through a critical practice of translatio(n), is the artistic communicability of human experience.