Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie - Softcover

Aldama, Frederick Luis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292722109 ISBN 13: 9780292722101

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2003

Synopsis

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's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at Ohio State University.

Review:

"In this exciting new book, Frederick Luis Aldama has done an outstanding job of remapping ‘magical realism." (Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0292722109
• ISBN 13: 9780292722101
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 157