García Márquez and the Global South

Even when its focus is ostensibly local, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary output registers the global forces—and, specifically, the imbalances of economic, political, and cultural power—that condition those local circumstances. These same forces are the dynamics that define the Global South in the present. Following the most recent work in the field, the Global South is here understood not simply as a place name or post–Cold War substitute for the Third World, but as the resistant political imaginary arising from the mutual recognition of shared or analogous circumstances by marginalized or dispossessed groups throughout the world. This article explores the three principal intersections between García Márquez’s work and the Global South understood as a relational and analytical category. First, it outlines the ways in which his work registers global—and, importantly, South-South—circuits of exchange, opening up new comparative itineraries. Second, it elaborates the ways in which these comparative connections build toward a critique of the global system, such that García Márquez provides both the grounds and a model for what this article calls “Global South thinking.” The final section addresses the circulation and influence of García Márquez’s work in the literatures of the Global South. Much of the existing commentary on this topic (his influence on Third World, postcolonial, or even world literature) has focused on magical realism and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But, the article shows, works such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold have also had a profound influence, on both individual texts and their reception.