More than two decades after the publication of these famous words, Benedict Anderson's reflection on the grip of nation-ness in contemporary imaginings of community continues to hold true even today, when observers of the dire consequences of nationalism gone awry have been cautioning against militant nationalism and advocating a move towards postnational construction of community for just as long. Nationalism informs not only political thought and action, but also the ways in which history is written, literary texts shaped and literary criticism mapped. The seemingly conflicting impulses driving political, literary or critical discourses today may be seen as differing responses to nationalism and its institutions of knowledge, and more particularly to the nation-state as a paradigm of knowledge that serves as a site of resistance to and interrogation by other forms of organization of political power and intellectual labour. Magical realism, in its combination of the fantastic and the real, has been producing political discourses that partake in imagining communities as ‘limited, sovereign’ nations with roots in ‘time immemorial’ derived from what are often termed ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ myths, religions and cultures, while subverting realism that has been so much part of the post-Enlightenment empirical worldview that included nationalism. This nationalist impulse, often disguised as vague empire-writes-back and hybridity-accommodating type of postcolonial politics in the body of criticism surrounding magical realism of Spanish America, comes to the fore in the literary texts produced outside the immediate environment of magical realism's ‘homeland’.

Jonathan Allison takes the familiar notion of magical realism as ‘a narrative mode’ to task in ‘Magical Nationalism, Lyric Poetry and the Marvellous: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney’, and argues persuasively that the combination of the fantastic and the real in Irish lyrical poetry is no different from magical realism, and in fact, its politics coincides with the postcolonial impulses of the mode so prevalent in the novel.