Postethnic Narrative Criticism
Postethnic Narrative Criticism
Frederick Luis Aldama
Copyright Date: 2003
Published by: University of Texas Press
https://doi.org/10.7560/705166
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/705166
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Book Info
Postethnic Narrative Criticism
Book Description:

Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world.

This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo'sSo Far from God,Oscar "Zeta" Acosta'sAutobiography of a Brown Buffalo,Salman Rushdie'sMidnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses,andThe Moor's Last Sigh,Julie Dash'sDaughters of the Dust,and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi'sSammy and Rosie Get Laid.Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.

eISBN: 978-0-292-79770-3
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. ix-xii)
  4. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. xiii-xvi)
  5. Introduction RETHREADING THE MAGICAL REALIST DEBATE
    Introduction RETHREADING THE MAGICAL REALIST DEBATE (pp. 1-16)

    Magical realism”: Does the term identify a subtype of basic prose epic genre, a storytelling style, or an ethnopolitics of representation? Furthermore, if identified as a subtype, is magical realism to be located within a particular cultural and historical period such as the postcolonial or postmodern, or does it transcend periodization? If magical realism differs from its next of kin—realism and the fantastic—then how does it differ and why? As more postcolonial and multiethnic writers and directors gravitate toward magical realism as a form for telling stories, does this trend allow for an identification of it as an...

  6. One REBELLIOUS AESTHETIC ACTS
    One REBELLIOUS AESTHETIC ACTS (pp. 17-41)

    When Gabriel García Márquez’sCien años de soledadwas first published in Spanish in 1967, it flew off bookstore shelves at a rate never before imagined. Gregory Rabassa’s scrupulously careful translation hit worldwide Anglophone book markets hard three years later—leading to the overnight global success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez was hailed as el rey of realismo mágico, or what I call magicorealism.¹ García Márquez not only formally situated Latin America on the world literary map (a task already begun by Borges and Rulfo, and solidified by his contemporaries Cortázar and Fuentes), he introduced a global...

  7. Two DASH’S AND KUREISHI’S REBELLIOUS MAGICOREELS
    Two DASH’S AND KUREISHI’S REBELLIOUS MAGICOREELS (pp. 42-62)

    Contemporary ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealist narratives represent a late-capitalist society that is characterized as being more and more unreal. French critics Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have respectively identified this as a “society of the spectacle” or the “hyperreal” in which the “real” in the world out there is a grand theatrical performance that covers over the estranging effect of exploitation and oppression by capitalism on peoples around the world. If this is the case, then how might an ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magico-realism use its aesthetic components to guide its readers into an identification of this fact? Again, this is...

  8. Three OSCAR “ZETA” ACOSTA’S DE-FORMED AUTO-BIO-GRAPHÉ
    Three OSCAR “ZETA” ACOSTA’S DE-FORMED AUTO-BIO-GRAPHÉ (pp. 63-75)

    Chicano/a novelists such as Aristeo Brito, Alfredo Véa, Ron Arias, Ana Castillo, and Denise Chávez often invent storyworlds whose narrators and characters do not distinguish between the unreal and the real; they use magicorealism as a storytelling mode that allows their characters to engage with and question restrictive ideologies and such divisions as those that separate Latin American from U.S., metropolitan from rural,criolloelite frommestizo campesino, Western from indigenous; they use magicorealism as a self-reflexive storytelling mode that has the potential to expand the reader’s perception of the world. For example, Ron Arias’s use of magicorealism in his...

  9. Four ANA CASTILLO’S (EN)GENDERED MAGICOREALISM
    Four ANA CASTILLO’S (EN)GENDERED MAGICOREALISM (pp. 76-89)

    Magicorealism can be a narrative mode used by U.S. Latina authors to invent stories that centrally emplace their Latina characters. As we have seen in the past few decades, the form can also be a storytelling mode used by some Latina authors as a formulaic container for spiced-up, magical stories that uncritically reproduce exotic stereotypes. (As I mentioned in the first chapter, this would include, but is not limited to, writers such as Isabel Allende, Sandra Benítez, and María Amparo Escandón.) In this case, Febe Portillo’s critique of magicorealism as a narrative that limits “how much of a social message...

  10. Five SALMAN RUSHDIE’S FOURTHSPACE NARRATIVE RE-CONQUISTAS
    Five SALMAN RUSHDIE’S FOURTHSPACE NARRATIVE RE-CONQUISTAS (pp. 90-102)

    When Rudyard Kipling publishedKimin 1902, he did not just give the world an adventure novel. The detailed realism he used to describe the protagonist Kim’s coming-of-age and his journey across Northeast India mapped an Indian landscape filled with primitive, childlike “burned-black” (49) people who depended on the parenting of a civilized, white, colonial elite for survival. The narrative pauses to give sympathy to Kim’s plight only when he enters into a space where he is subservient to the British Raj; it renders Kim degenerate when he enters into the Indian- and Arab-identified autonomous cultural spaces. Here, Kipling’s realism...

  11. Coda MAPPING THE POSTETHNIC CRITICAL METHOD
    Coda MAPPING THE POSTETHNIC CRITICAL METHOD (pp. 103-110)

    Gabriel García Márquez endsOne Hundred Years of Solitudewith the last of the Buendías, Aureliano Babilonia, deciphering Melquíades’s Sanskrit parchments. The more he deciphers, the more he discovers that he is reading his own beginning and end. At the end ofPostethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie, I return to the beginning— to the preface where I begin to tell the story of my ethnic and cultural dislocation. While I had no choice in my family’s decision—nor for that matter did my mother have much choice, living...

  12. Notes
    Notes (pp. 111-122)
  13. Works Cited
    Works Cited (pp. 123-130)
  14. Index
    Index (pp. 131-141)
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