Magical realism coincides with the official, vernacular ideologies of the continent on mestizaje, or the mestizo, as a testimony of a “shared” history of invasion, sexual violence and slavery that dates back hundreds of years. In Latin America, the notion of magical realism closely related with Latin-American literature and art, defines and makes up a large part of its expression of tradition and modernity and as we propose here, it permeates the exchange between televisual fiction and the audiences. And it is the least postcolonial because it continues to be dominated by the two languages of its former masters (Spanish and Portuguese) and there is a growing and conflictive “interdependence” with the “other” America and the English language, which is invasive, while the different autochthonous, indigenous languages that were spoken by the region’s natives before the conquest are not recognized, despite the fact that many of these languages are in dire danger of extinction. It is the most postcolonial because it obtained that status before most of Asia and Africa. Latin America is at the same time the most and the least postcolonial region in the world. The “old novelty” of the Latin-American region To achieve the above, we propose here an analytical perspective that is rather unusual in the literature on audiovisual media, one that focuses on certain elements that are not always evident by themselves and yet, they denote their existence manifesting in several subtle manners, not in a direct, frontal manner, as many of the most profound elements of Latin-American culture. This is a meaning that does not only spring from its screen, but one that is constructed and reconstructed in front of it, among its audiences in its varied interaction with contents, with the televisual and with its own history and culture ( Orozco, 2016). Therefore, in these pages we propose seeing television beyond itself, from that particular region that is Latin America, which is historically, culturally and politically unique because it is only from there that we believe it is possible to understand its polychromatic link and its profound meaning to all Latin-Americans.
We admit that television is undergoing a transition, but not a process of extinction rather, it is coexisting with other screens and becoming once again a transcendental and versatile medium, not only because of its intrinsic properties as a medium and its growing convergence on many devices, but above all due to the particular characteristics of the regions and cultures where it operates and has inserted. Television is also a source of entertainment, information, acculturation and dissemination of political, advertising and educational messages. And we put emphasis on many things, because most of the discourses about the threatened existence of television focus almost exclusively on its media-technological dimension, which is of course being surpassed by smart screens, whose preference among the audiences is ever increasing. The contemporary “explosion” of television, in addition to diversifying, transforming and broadening its forms of existence, has amplified the idea of television itself towards something different and unheard-of, as a converging source of the audiovisual or televisual, so much so, that many thought it was going to disappear that is why contrasting and even schizophrenic debates have arisen about the end of television ( Buonanno, 2015 Scolari, 2016).īeyond that international debate in which television is assumed as a medium that is in transition and soon to disappear, in this text we start from the provocative conviction that television, as any other media, is “many things at the same time”. Understanding television or any other media today presupposes much more than just giving an account of its technological, business model or political evolution, despite the dazzle caused by inventions and digital gadgets, the new business models and the various agreements, pacts and modalities between the public and the private and between the global and the local around the world ( Maxwell & Miller, 2014 Miller, 2016).