Presented as part of the SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series

Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, the editors of McOndo (1996), a Pan-Hispanic short-story anthology, challenged Magic Realism’s largely illegitimate stronghold over the representation of Latin America and posited their own McOndo, the antipodal of García Márquez’s imaginary town Macondo in Cien años de soledad (1967). In the prologue to the anthology they presented a place ‘larger, overpopulated and full of pollution, with motorways, metro, cable TV and slums. In McOndo there is McDonald’s, Mac computers and condominiums, as well as five star hotels built with laundered money and giant malls’ (my translation). Whilst the McOndo movement was criticised as being politically apathetic, accepting of neoliberalism and consumerist norms, they were also criticised for being inauthentic. I consider whether what has been constructed as authentic—for example, Spanish American Magical Realism à la Gabriel García Márquez—can often be a most inauthentic representation. And McOndo, condemned as inauthentic in this respect, is not more authentic but instead problematizes homogenising forces within a society and recognises a heterogeneous make-up and hybrid realities.

Thomas Nulley-Valdés is a second year PhD candidate in the School of Spanish within SLLL. His doctoral thesis is on Latin American identity discourse and contemporary literary representations of cultural identity and hybridity. He graduated with a BA (Hons) from ANU in 2012. This presentation is the work in progress of a paper he will deliver in June at the UNSW graduate conference Interrogating the In-between.