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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...