This chapter explores how the postcolonial predicament bequeathed by the British Empire challenges us to rethink conceptions of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Britishness’. The specifically Anglo-American sense of the close connection between postmodernism and postcolonial studies is established via the identification of ‘grand narrative’ with the ‘civilising mission’, but this equation is problematised through a reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and a review of the changing history of British imperial ideology. A different approach to the interplay of fictive and historical narrative is identified in Ngugi we Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel that locates characteristic postmodern concerns within the late colonial violence of the Kenyan Emergency. The novel is shown to anticipate a contemporary cultural moment in which postmodernism’s choreography of certainty and uncertainty proves increasingly ill-suited.

This contribution prepares for a lengthy study of imaginative geography, and its metanarrative as an empowering narrative strategy. The classical and medieval Arab-Islamic geographer was not necessarily a geographer per se. Philologists often use their knowledge of space to construct a wide ranging inquiry that happened to serve generations of geographers. A close reading in a number of explanatory commentaries and marginalia helps to perceive the turns and fluctuations in geographic genealogies in relation to lands outside the Islamic core. The self-conscious geographer needs not only to define method or mode, but also to vindicate a departure, and claim or deny antecedent authority and source material. A republic of letters finds substantiation and root in these insights, and explanations, and complements other explorations in compendiums, encyclopedic knowledge, and literary or broad cultural exchange.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

Chapter 5 examines urban beautification efforts, welfare associations, liberal clubs, and staged state theater (e.g., the Minerva festivals) during Manuel Estrada Cabrera’s dictatorship (1898–1920). If state sovereignty was circumscribed by the coffee planters’ efforts in the countryside, in the city of Cobán, Estrada Cabrera responded to popular demands for access to civilization by staging elaborate festivals that provided all Guatemalans access to Western civilization and learning.The ladino nationalism that flourished under Estrada Cabrera blurred racial boundaries and held up the ladino artisan as the ideal national subject. A series of national and global events – earthquakes, World War I, the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, and the 1919 influenza pandemic – upended these efforts and transformed the Minerva festivals from symbols of national inclusion and modern belonging into symbols of the corruption and political discontent that erupted in 1920 with the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera.