ABSTRACT
“Magical realism isn’t a fad – it has been around as long as art has been,” Salman Rushdie insisted about the narrative mode that combines literary realism with “irreducible elements” of magic. Rushdie’s argument is provocative since literary magical realism is most often thought to have emerged in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. West African magical realism evidences a rich, multifaceted relationship with wonder genres. West African magical realism’s wonder poetics thereby indicate ways of knowing, yet this is an epistemology that recognizes limitations in understanding as human beings encounter what Wole Soyinka has called “a manifestly complex reality”. The fairy tale stands as a significant antecedent to magical realism, a narrative form that pervasively has been understood to marshal the marvelous against a hegemonic literary realism and, by extension, scientific rationality and empiricism. Magical realism affects wonder by trafficking in wonders, marvels, and magic.
