Politics & Power Quote by Terri Windling

Windling’s line is a quiet side-eye at the way culture markets discovery. By separating “the label” from the thing itself, she exposes how publishing and academia often act like customs agents: stamping passports on stories that have been traveling freely for centuries. The point isn’t to deny Latin America’s decisive role in popularizing modern magic realism; it’s to resist the implication that the uncanny only becomes legitimate once it’s been named, categorized, and exported with a recognizable brand.

The subtext is protective, almost activist. Calling magic realism “new” can sound like praise, but it also risks shrinking a vast lineage into a trend cycle, as if wonder arrived with a syllabus. Windling, an artist steeped in folklore and myth, is defending an older, messier tradition where the marvelous wasn’t a stylistic “mode” but a default setting: epics with gods, medieval romances with enchantments, oral tales where the supernatural is neighborhood news. Her phrasing “as long as literature has been around” is a deliberate leveling move, pulling prestige away from gatekeepers and returning it to storytellers across time and geography.

Context matters: “magic realism” became a high-status category in late-20th-century Anglophone culture, a way to praise non-Western fiction while also keeping it safely exotic. Windling’s insistence on continuity is a push against that soft exoticism. She’s arguing that the magic isn’t an import; it’s part of the human archive, briefly rebranded for modern consumption.