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World Building

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World building is a familiar concept in video game design, particularly role-playing games that take place in fantastical worlds with rules that the player learns through gradual advancement in the game. In literature, world building is not restricted to fantastical settings; in a sense, all literature requires construction of an author’s particular idea of reality, which can consist of any combination of real and otherworldly elements. Every portrayal of a world in literature expresses a different subjectivity. If we consider world building in this light, we can also complicate how we think of the binary of real and non-real in speculative literature and conceive of interventions that refuse a universalizing sense of reality.
 


In Hector Ramirez’s “Auténtico” for Apogee Journal, the author critiques the burden of the label, “magical realism” in Latinx literature. While the term is largely applied to Latinx writing that showcases an unlikely or magical event occurring in a setting that is otherwise mundane, the term has also been critiqued for overwriting culturally specific mythologies and folklores with Western concepts of the real and non-real. In Ramirez’s case, his narration of the story of his sister pulling cocoons out of her mouth certainly portrays an exceptional moment in everyday life. “I’m going to tell you a story at the risk of being called a magical realist,” Ramirez writes, knowing that the narration of this story will be subjected to such genre scrutiny by the white Western reader. His piece refers to this disjunction of racially and culturally charged values of what is considered real and non-real, especially the varying definitions of these terms across social contexts.
 
Perhaps instead of conceiving world building as a rupture from reality, which supposes definitive terms of real and non-real, we can consider the ways in which our reality has always consisted of familiar and unfamiliar elements. Speculative literature, in a sense, is about constructing blended realities. In this way, conversations about racial and cultural difference is not exceptional to the rule but imbued in every fiber of the narrative.
 

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