Magic realism as a cosmopolitan borderland: Expanding reality through sound and affect in Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever

This article develops the idea of magic realism as a cosmopolitan borderland to analyse Maya Da-Rin’s A Febre ( The Fever ) (2019), a film focused on an Indigenous man who suddenly falls ill. My perspective frames reality as a borderland space where human and non-human subjects, the material and the supernatural, modernity and primitivism converge and intermingle to forge an expanded reality. This approach is anchored by a post-human understanding of cosmopolitanism, which considers the engagement between human and non-human subjects to forge a common world. Additionally, it accounts for a decolonial cosmopolitan approach to the borderland, framing it as a space where subjects negotiate their political belonging, culture and historically marginalized epistemologies. The argument I put forward suggests that magic realism as a cosmopolitan borderland emerges in The Fever to challenge Cartesian dualism through a sensory aesthetics that acknowledges encounters between the human and non-human. To address this perspective, I first examine how an acoustemological approach to sound creates a cosmopolitan borderland space where Indigenous cosmologies are expressed to reveal an extended reality. Second, I explore the body as a cosmopolitan borderland, conceiving it as a space where encounters between different realms, the magic and the material, take place to address a narrative focused on displacement.