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Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures

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moments of magical realism in us ethnic literatures

Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a

division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England,

company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has

companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United

Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 29329- 9

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Moments of magical realism in U.S. ethnic literatures / edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandn

and Richard Perez.

p. cm.

ISBN 978- 1- 137- 29329- 9 (alk. paper)

1. American literature Minority authors History and criticism. 2. Magic realism

(Literature) 3. Ethnic groups in literature. I. Di Iorio Sandn, Lyn, 1964 II. Perez,

Richard, 1969

PS153.M56M66 2012

810.9920693 dc23 2012028678


A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: December 2012

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures 1

Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

Part I: Traumatic Inheritances: The Psychic Life of Magic

1 Trauma, Magic, and Genealogy: Moments of Magical Realism

in Daughters of the Stone by Dhalma Llanos- Figueroa and

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid 19

Lyn Di Iorio Sandn

2 Jewish Post- Holocaust Fiction and the Magical Realist Turn 39

Caroline Rody

3 Flying to Save Her Life: Bad Luck, Bad Choices,

and Bad Mothers in Gina B. Nahais Moonlight on

the Avenue of Faith 65

Ibis Gmez- Vega

Part II: Sensory Irruptions, Magical Sensibilities

4 Flashes of Transgression: The Fuk, Negative Aesthetics,

and the Future in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Daz 91

Richard Perez
5 Searching for Rhythm and Freedom: African American

Magical Realism and the Creation of a Home Country 109

Angela J. Francis

6 Of Magical Gourds and Secret Senses: The Uses of

Magical Realism in Asian American Literature 123

Begoa Simal- Gonzlez

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viii Contents

Part III: Prophetic Practices, Mythic Knowledges

7 We, the Shamans, Eat Tobacco and Sing: Figures of

Shamanic Power in US and Latin American Magical Realism 155

Wendy Faris

8 Mythic Realism, Dreams, and Prophecy in James Welchs

The Heartsong of Charging Elk 175

Lori Burlingame

9 Blood Re(a)d: Native American Literature and the

Emergence of the Mythic Real 193

Allison E. Brown

Part IV: Antinomies: Magic, Memory, and Space

10 Lifting the Weight of the Continent: Magical Realism

on the North American Landscape 213

Shannin Schroeder

11 Mama Day: Where Gothicism and Magical Realism Meet 241

Donald J. Reilly

12 Latinos and Magic Realism: Promised Land or Convoluted History 259


Romn de la Campa

Notes on Contributors 269

Index 273

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INTRODUCTION

Tracing Magical Irruptions

in US Ethnic Literatures

Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

Moments of Magical Realism in American Ethnic Literatures examines how

magical moments appear episodically in the otherwise realist fiction

of contemporary US authors of so- called ethnic derivation that is,

authors who are members of the largest minority groups in the United States,

determined either by ethnicity or national origin. The critical essays in this anthology

shift away from privileging magical realism as a monolithic category in the

literatures of the Americas. Yet the critics see that magical moments or irruptions

deepen narrative meaning and signal breaks with the hegemonic constitution

of everyday American reality, which often hides colonial histories of race, class,

and sexuality behind a realism that promises a straightforward representation of

the myriad situations and conditions of contemporary life in the United States.

Thus many US ethnic narratives negotiate between an often fetishized magical

realism and a realism ideologically coded by the conceit that it faithfully represents

the world(s) it narrates. As US ethnic writers understand, these two positions

equally conceal and flatten many of the social complexities inherent in the lives

of US ethnic or minority subjects perceived as not having completely blended

into the so- called melting pot. This anthology claims, therefore, that US ethnic
or minority writers insert magical moments in otherwise realist texts to highlight

certain spectral realms within our midst with, as Avery Gordon puts it, a seething

presence that interrupts certain taken- for- granted realities that illuminate

that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.1 Consequently,

to say that a given text contains magical realist moments, or even to say that it

contains a ghost, differs from saying it is a work of magical realism. The subject

apprehends the almost fleeting effect, or moment, as magical. The magical

realist moment, effect, or irruption, then, represents a place of both opacity and

illumination in an otherwise realist text where a forgotten or repressed history or

discursive formation intrudes or appears for the US subject in a manner that is

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2 Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

catalytic. Our critical approach on these magical, nonrealist moments or effects

focuses on the work of writers from the largest ethnic and national origin groups

in the United States, such as Latino, African American and Asian American writers,

as well as other significant writers who are members of American minority

groups, such as Native Americans, Jewish Americans and Iranian Americans.

Although we do not consider all US ethnic or minority groups here, we do

address most of those whose work delves in such magical realist effects.

This compilation brings together groundbreaking essays by both established

experts on magical realism and figures in US ethnic and trans- American literatures

as well as younger rising literary theorists interested in exploring the

diversity of texts that lie just outside the bounds of realism. Although there have

been many critical works that focused on magical realism and some famous

anthologies that brought together the best global criticism on the mode there
has never been an anthology that explored nonrealist moments and tendencies

in works written mostly from a US minority or ethnic perspective. Because the

books focus is on the confluence of nonrealist literary effects and texts written

by US ethnic writers, many (although not all) of the critics in this anthology also

actually come from these backgrounds.

Most works that deal critically with magical realism, be they anthologies or

single- author texts, are concerned with the history of the development of the

term and with defining exactly what magical realism is. The definitive anthology

on magical realism Magical Realism: History, Theory, and Community, edited by

Wendy Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora,2 details the history of the term and

offers different definitions, ranging from its first use in German postexpressionism

to its famous Latin American formulations to finally a more global perspective.

The most recent anthology on magical realism A Companion to Magical

Realism, edited by Stephen Hart and Wen- chin Ouyang,3 brings the focus on

magical realism to the work of new writers, but like Faris and Parkinson Zamoras

book, it retains a focus that is global. This is laudable in terms of showing how

vibrant the mode is, but it does not examine the mode in great depth as a vital

presence in the United States. The first anthology ever to evaluate US ethnic

literatures is Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures, edited

by Jesus Benito, Ana Mara Manzanas, and Begoa Simal- Gonzlez,4 whose essay

on Asian American literature graces this anthology. However, many of the writers

on whom it focuses Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Gloria Naylor, and Amy

Tan are writers whose work we believe features the breaks and irruptions we

just described for example, the past into the present but who do not create

texts that are magical realist in the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, or


Pedro Pramo by Juan Rulfo, the primary Latin American examples of magical

realism. Interestingly most of the just- named US minority authors themselves

have often stressed in repeated ways that they are either emphatically, or largely,

NOT magical realist writers. The fact that Uncertain Mirrors does not address the

divergence between Latin American magical realism and the type of magically

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Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures 3

inflected realism evident in the work of US ethnic writers is a flaw in an otherwise

admirable work of criticism.

A critical sensitivity to magical effects, we argue, offers uncanny entries into

the layered consciousnesses of minority, ethnic, and postcolonial subjects in the

United States, whose psychic recesses are often compulsively concealed under

the facades of systems of power such as capitalism, colonial histories, and social

marginalization. If in their most general sense magical irruptions are horrific and

seductive residual manifestations of socially unconscious forces, it is the mandate

of fiction, and all New World artistic production, to conjure these invisible presences

and translate them into a narrative form. In the New World, then, artistic

production becomes a body or receptacle possessed in a sense that refers to the

syncretic Afro- Caribbean religious concept of being mounted, or inhabited, by

the ghostly content of race, class, and gender. Hidden stories and erased memories

emerge in the imagination of minority writers in the Americas like a flash

of the spirit,5 to use Robert Farris Thompsons phrase, imposing their narratives

on those initiated writers and readers, creating in these spectral encounters what

Margarite Fernndez Olmos calls spirited identities.6 Implied here is a very particular

reading and writing process that taps into an initiated hermeneutics sifting
through the density of experience to recall history- histories- stories.7 An attunement

to spectrality, as this study shows, requires a very particular sensibility, an

openness to, as Toni Morrison puts it, invisible things that are not necessarily

not- there.8 Thus fiction, New World writers teach us, is where the ghostly and

magical images and voices emerge, develop, appear, and speak.

Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures recognizes that while

magical realist, supernatural, and gothic effects, figures, and moments may appear

in a text, the text may not necessarily be a fully nonrealist text. One of our claims

is that often such texts are erroneously categorized as magical realist when, in

fact, what they mainly display are momentary yet very significant irruptions of

nonrealist tendencies into a realist text. We take the phrase irruptions from the

Caribbeanist critic douard Glissants influential and rich work Caribbean Discourse

in which he discusses how multiple, and sometimes contradictory, literary

effects exist in texts by Caribbean or minority writers. According to Glissant,

this reflects the fact that these writers are experimenting all at once with this

multiplicity of literary techniques and thus practicing a principle of Diversity

that spreads through the dynamism of communities.9 This notion of diversity

emerges against the sublimated difference of Sameness, which is ultimately

saturated by sheer historical complexity and like a liquid overflowing its vessel,

has everywhere released the pent- up force of Diversity.10 This process describes

the irruptive impact of magical moments in US ethnic literatures. For pent up

within the realism of a narrative is a traumatic kernel that effectively curves the

space of fictional description and tears at the very fabric of its form to reveal a

series of identificatory, social, and historical meanings released through a seismic

irruption and interruption, providing a deeper understanding of a violence

otherwise covered over, contained, repressed or dismissed. Thus the turn to an


imagery and vocabulary of so- called magic calls attention to an incomprehensible

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4 Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

or difficult- to- approach aspect of reality that must be rendered in different terms

so the diversity of experience colored by a history of violence is represented not

by a consistently magical or realist portrayal, but deformed by irruptive moments

indicative of terrible colonial truths underlying the nature of New World realities

and appearing in unexpected moments and locations.

For Glissant, Caribbean and minority texts often irrupt into modernity11 or

experience irruptions because they have not been able to pass through the longer

period of development more typical of older literary traditions, such as European

ones. As a result, they are forced to compress multiple thematic concerns into

one narrative work. Glissant explains, They must include all at once struggle,

aggressiveness, belonging, lucidity, distrust of self, absolute love, contours of the

landscape, emptiness of the cities, victories, and confrontations.12 This confluence

creates a narrative tension, a set of contradictory impulses that signal an othered

presence. In this sense, US ethnic literatures reopen wounds to emphasize

a historical dimension and advance through a polyphony of dramatic shocks,

at the level of conscious and unconscious, between incongruous phenomena or

episodes so disparate that no link can be discerned.13 Through momentary and

infrequent dramatic shocks of magic, US ethnic writers expose a fundamental

discontinuity in communal versus institutional memory, bringing to the fore the

violent foundations of social life. It is as if the shock of magic lies in the revelation

that reality, as is, is an insufficient barometer of lived experience. No, there

is something else, some other meaning that a smooth realistic surface hides. For
that, which surface order and logic belie, is almost erased; thus invisible presences

encountered in US ethnic literature through a fictional sixth sense tune in to

the sensuous incongruities accumulated in time and space. Dramatic shocks of

magic are irruptions of perception and reveal a sensitivity to ineffable signs neatly

organized within realism, which rub against each other, creating a spark or short

circuit of truth that forces its way into the narrative with epiphanic potency.

In this sense, the writers analyzed in this study turn to magical irruptions

as informative moments of knowledge production that help them decipher the

traumatic traces and symbols that have been veiled from social and historical

view. The minority or postcolonial writer in the United States accesses this alternative

ontology through a hermeneutic and phenomenological sixth sense that

experiences itself in a hallucinatory, dissociated, and out- of- body manner. It is

what Toni Morrison will call, for example, playing in the dark that is, imaginative

forays into the corners of consciousness where unexpected presences

provide a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a

mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.14 This socially

symbolic dimension is an imaginative response to brutal social and historical

marginalization, eliciting spectralized levels of subjectivity. The ethnic American

subject, then, is haunted doubly: historically, by an inscrutable past that he or

she must learn to read through the hints and fragments that remain, and socially,

through his or her own ontological location in the Real where s/he is rendered

ghostly by violent and systemic exclusions. It is these tensions, unbearable and

unabsorbable, that give rise to narrative irruptions in ethnic American literatures.

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Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures 5


The work of fiction, as Cathy Brogan argues, is to translate these magical effects

into a knowledge- producing form of fiction. Brogan states, The saving movement

from reenactment to enabling memory is represented as a movement from

traumatic silence into language. Through acts of narrative revision which are

often presented as acts of translation, linguistic or cultural the cycle of doom

is broken and the past digested. Translation functions like an exorcism because

it frames cultural inheritance, rendering the past in the terms of the present.15

In October 1988, Morrison delivered a talk at the University of Michigan outlining

what constituted a black work, though her comments could be extended

to US ethnic writers in general. Her analysis responded to many of the canonical

arguments taking place in the late 1980s. Morrisons focus moved from literature

and its place in the academy to spectral forms of history and storytelling.

This shift is evident in her title choice for the talk, which she said was initially

Canon Fodder and ultimately became Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The

Afro- American Presence in American Literature. For Morrison, the phrase

Canon Fodder is suggestive of a constituitive violence underlying the seemingly

neutral debates linking aesthetics to historical phenomena. First, the phrase

Canon Fodder reminded her of young men black or ethnics or poor or

working class who left high school for the war in Vietnam and were considered

by war resisters as fodder.16 In this sense, literary fodder also echoes a political

something, the war, dead bodies, and protestors hidden behind the tempered

ideological language of the state. The instrumentality of the word fodder allows

the state to play out a necropolitics, as Achille Mbembe has put it, for the ultimate

expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity

to dictate who may live and who must die.17 This sense of power, Morrison

continues, is found in the etymology of the first word in the phrase Canon
Fodder, which means tube, cane, or cane- like, reed and body of law, body

of rules, measuring rod: the image reflecting the boom of power announcing

the officially recognized set of texts.18 And I want to add that this boom

of power also has a historical dimension, announcing what and how archives

should be approached and read. What is officially recognized is not just a set

of texts but also a set of specified memories, narratives, and hermeneutics. In

the archive, the power to decide who must die and the power to interpret (or

what Edward Said called the permission to narrate) ideologically combine to

elide undigestible events. In this violent exchange, the ethnic Other is rendered

socially dead and often conceals within his or her consciousness eaten that

is, suppressed histories, knowledges, and populations. This is why Morrison

changes the essays title from the more realistic Canon Fodder to the magical

phrasing Unspeakable Things Unspoken. Highlighting the unspeakable and

the unspoken calls for an imaginative intervention by US ethnic literatures

into the ideologically layered language of race, ethnicity, and nationality,

effectively unlocking an unspeakable ontology and an unspoken history

through irruptions of magic.

US ethnic and minority writers recuperate and access these events and

moments through the imaginative power of their fiction. Thus, as Morrison

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6 Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

argues, canon building is inextricably linked to national defense and empire

building, which in turn connects back, in an enclosing circularity, to issues of

criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language,

the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, and the recuperations
of the humanistic imagination.19 At the heart of such an enormous productivity

are unspeakable and unspoken presences. A historical presence not necessarily

chronicled but left over to be interpreted and imagined by US ethnic artistic

endeavors and serious scholarship.20 Where must such an effort begin? Where

is its point of entry? What intellectual feats have to be performed by the

author and critic to extrapolate this seething historical and social presence? For

Morrison, the opacity suggested by absent presences is where ethnic writers must

find magical traces of themselves. She argues,

We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily not- there; that

a void may be empty but not be a vacuum. In addition certain absences are so

stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with

intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population

held away from them. Looking at the scope of American literature, I cant help

thinking that the question should never have been Why am I, an Afro- American,

absent from it? It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly

interesting question is What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author

or critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has

that performance had on the work? What are the strategies of escape from knowledge?

Of willful oblivion? . . . The exploration I am suggesting is, how does one sit

in the audience observing, watching the performance of Young America, say, in the

nineteenth century, say, and reconstruct the play, its director, its plot, and its cast in

such a manner that its very point never surfaces? Not why. How?21

The essays in this anthology trace the study of presences not necessarily notthere.

The oblivion of ethnic otherness is willfully enacted in the United

States very historical portrayal of itself, in its national and social tenets (freedom,

democracy) that place whiteness as the symbolic expression of these ideals.


Whiteness, in this sense, is the universal marker of a being whose enlightened

constitution lies in itself an impossible conflation of ideals and flesh, knowledge

and morality, ontology and history. Interestingly, for Morrison, America is

young not because, as Ralph Waldo Emerson argues, we live in the influential

shadows of European culture, but because it marginalizes Diverse segments of

its own culture. Emersons ambivalent obsession with Europe is juxtaposed to

his active turning away from Africa and other parts of the Americas.22 The result

is a surplus presence of whiteness that must be described in the same language

Morrison uses to describe black absence: whiteness is so stressed, so ornate, so

planned that its presence aims to arrest us with intentionality and purpose.

It attempts to escape the contamination of knowledge by presenting itself as

the exemplary embodiment of the human. Enter, in this performance of race,

the specter not of Hamlets father, as Jacques Derrida has it, nor of Europe as

Emerson fears, but of blackness, brownness, yellowness, redness, and all the color

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Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures 7

gradations and ways of being that are sublimated by whiteness. Enter, moreover,

another conceptual understanding and location where archival events happen

and storytelling functions as an imaginative corrective of history. In the construction

of Young America, the void of history is populated with invisible

things, unspeakable events, and unspoken stories. Perhaps the very point of

ethnic literatures is to locate certain pressure points that tap into invisible social

depths so as to elicit and bring to the surface artifacts of knowability. These spectral

pressure points (or dis/joints) are those locations in the national body that

give, bend, and contort the veiled poses of authority.


For Morrison, imagination and the past merge into a convoluted process

of rememory. Rememory begins from a fundamental disbelief in the linearity of

time. As her protagonist Sethe describes it,

I was talking about time. Its so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass

on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some

things you forget. Other things you never do. But its not. Places, places are still

there. If a house burns down, its gone, but the place the picture of it stays, and

not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture

floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I dont think it, even if

I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place

where it happened . . . Someday you will be walking down the road and you hear

something or see something going on. So clear. And you think its you thinking it

up. A thought picture. But no. Its when you bump into a rememory that belongs

to someone else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. Its never going

away. Even if the whole farm every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is

still there and whats more, if you go there you who was never there if you go

there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for

you, waiting for you.23

History, image, and memory form, outside of the tenets of traditional or archival

time, the presence of pictures engraved into the landscape by degrees of intensity.

In this sense, a rememory is an unintended integration of invisible places and

events into an active consciousness. Morrison is not talking about a site focused

on an event, as Alain Badiou conceives of it, where the empirical truthfulness of a

historic event transforms those who come in contact with it, getting them, by its

sheer force, to follow its social consequences.24 In Beloved, the image or thought

picture is an unconscious connection that alters or bumps the subject out of


the now and intermixes it with the nonarchived and nonrealist history of place.

The event and place (of something, of slavery, reservations, colonial wars, and

diasporas) repeats itself, touching and infiltrating the being of those who exist

in its perpetual presence: The picture is still there and whats more, if you go

there you who never was there if you go there and stand in the place where it

was, it will happen again; it will be there waiting for you. For Morrison, then,

rememory impels one to reconstruct the world these remains imply25 through

an imaginative act to yield up a kind of truth.26 As she argues, feelings . . .

accompany the picture, making visible and unspoken a historical nervous

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8 Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

system, in Michael Taussigs sense, where history reveals itself not just through

thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning but through awe

and reverence and mystery and magic.27 The phenomenology of magical irruptions,

of the historical pictures that bump, without warning or pretext, into those

in their midst, creates a nervous condition, a heightened sensitivity, accessed

through the act of writing itself. Taussig compares this ineluctable relation of

writing and magic to historical nerves:

Those who have had to abandon that sort of magic are left with a different wondering;

namely how to write the Nervous System that passes through us and makes

us what we are the problem being, as I see it, that every time you give it a fix, it

hallucinates, or worse, counter your system with its nervousness, your nervousness

with your system. As far as Im concerned, and I admit to going slow with these NS

matters, this puts writing on a completely different plane than hitherto conceived.

It calls for an understanding of the representation as contiguous with that being


represented and not as suspended above and distant from the represented . . . that

knowing is giving oneself over to a phenomenon rather than thinking about it

from above.28

Being and knowledge of traumatic histories are not an archival supposition but

an openness to certain phenomenon wherein a sixth sense, a New World nervousness,

signals the imminent arrival of a magical sensibility, whose irruptive

presence forces us to be attentive to a completely different plane than

hitherto conceived.

Perhaps the question, as Gayatri Spivak has rightly claimed, is not who will

speak but who will listen?29 Magical irruptions in ethnic literatures shift the

emphasis of authority from the unitary speaker to those who are receptive, who

listen to and feel what Leslie Marmon Silko has called howls for justice,30 the

echoes and incongruities embedded in national realities. Magic in this sense

is indicative of a foreign element and mode of perception. What is foreign or

strange or hidden sits at the center of New World histories, offering in Gloria

Anzaldas words, a new consciousness.31 For identity in the Americas begins

with a series of questions suggested by the magical irruptions, foreign sights, and

ghostly appearances, which the writers who are the focus of this anthology are

fictionally concerned with. Queries that make the boundaries of the self tremble:

Who or what are you? What forms of knowledge does magic propose? How will

we coexist? What is our future? That ghostliness, that foreignness in the American

who hears and responds to the magical summoning him or her to both the

past and the future, is the subject of this book.

There are 13 contributors in this anthology. The anthology is organized into

four parts: Part I: Traumatic Inheritances: The Psychic Life of Magic; Part II:

Sensory Irruptions; Magical Sensibilities; Part III: Prophetic Practices; Mythic


Knowledges; and Part IV: Antinomies: Magic, Memory, and Space. The

anthology begins with coeditor Lyn Di Iorio Sandns essay Trauma, Magic, and

Genealogy, in which she yokes together magical realism and trauma theory, two

modes of literature and of reading literature that have been compared by only

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Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures 9

one other critic.32 To trauma theorys idea that the traumatized only begin to

heal when they can tell the story of their trauma to others, she adds the notion

that it is often precisely the presence of the magical that reveals that a story about

psychic trauma is being, or needs to be, told. In this sense, magical realism is the

sign of discursive formations long repressed and exhibits features that subsist only

in traumatic memory and cannot be fully reconstructed. Moments of magical

realism, then, are the traces of these lost, forgotten, or suppressed discursive formations.

She also looks at the function of the magical in novels such as the Puerto

Rican Americans Dhalma Llanos- Figueroas Daughters of the Stone and Caribbean

American author Jamaica Kincaids Autobiography of My Mother to show how

subjective and gradual genealogies and reconstructions of pasts and presents filled

with psychic trauma can be set in motion by a spectral figure, which observers tell

themselves could not have been real, and an object such as a stone that releases

dreams, visions, and acts of magic.

Caroline Rodys essay Jewish Post- Holocaust Fiction and the Magical Realist

Turn argues that magical moments in contemporary Jewish American fiction

serve the imaginative will to reanimate buried histories, to memorialize and even

resurrect the dead. Her essay contends that in contemporary Jewish American

fiction, a recent turn to magical realism coincides with a profound, imaginatively


generative turn to the Jewish past. Departing from realist plots of assimilation to

engage in a quest for origins, writers including J. S. Foer, Joseph Skibell, Steve

Stern, and Nicole Krauss use literary magic in ways consonant with, yet distinct

from its use by postcolonial and other ethnic writers. Modern Jewish fiction,

Rody argues, has long drawn on the magic and miracles of Jewish folklore, scripture,

and mysticism. Though positioned quite differently from magical realisms

practitioners in the third, decolonizing world, assimilated, middle- class Jewish

American writers influenced by magics global rise assert a kindred view from

the fringe of dominant European cultures, and use magic, too, to express . . . a

world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement.

In Flying to Save Her Life: Bad Luck, Bad Choices, and Bad Mothers in

Gina B. Nahais Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Ibis Gmez- Vega shows how

the Iranian American Nahai uses moments of magical realism and the flawed

relationships of mothers and daughters to create a textured and multigenerational

story of loss and betrayal. Throughout the novel, Gmez- Vega contends, Nahai

examines how women play a prominent role in the oppression of women even

when they are themselves oppressed as women within their community and as

members of a small Jewish community restricted to a ghetto in Iran, a Muslim

country. The women in Nahais novel strike out against other women, especially

their daughters, for no apparent reason, and very few escape the sorrow created

by a mothering so uncharacteristically lacking in sympathy that girls must

develop their own coping mechanisms to escape it. Magic, in the form of women

sprouting wings and flying away, provides an escape for the embattled daughters

of mothers who harm their own offspring, even if generations of bad luck, bad

choices, and bad mothering leave their mark on the women who must live down

the curse of the women who leave.


Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

10 Lyn Di Iorio Sandn and Richard Perez

In Part II, Sensory Irruptions; Magical Sensibilities, coeditor Richard Perez

explores how a New World aesthetics is born by attaching itself to the negative

that is, the productive possibility that arises out of painful experiences, not only

as fodder for the production of art, but as a way of envisioning an alternate or

magical real future. In Junot Dazs The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the

reader, Perez argues, is confronted by a hemispheric curse that acts as a ruthless

agent of destruction. This curse, embodied in the novel by Rafael Trujillo, the

brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic, emerges out of a history of violence,

from the plantation to present- day militarism, and comes to represent a predatory

masculinity, which infects and deforms the social fabric. This violent backdrop

informs a set of close readings of the novels two main characters Hypata

Belicia Cabral and Oscar Wao. If violence pervades their lives, barring the

possibility of love, then what remains of their tragic circumstances is magically

documented for posterity. It is in the written (as magical) that a zafa or

counterspell emerges. This essay, titled Flashes of Transgression: The Fuk,

Negative Aesthetics, and the Future in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Daz, argues that Daz confronts the curse by establishing an aesthetics

steeped in the negative, thereby delineating, through the act of writing,

a vision of the future.

In her essay Searching for Rhythm and Freedom: African American Magical

Realism and the Creation of a Home Country, Angela Francis argues that political

critique, tied to the appreciation of ones culture and the folk, is often found

in magical realism, where social and political motivations lie beneath the disorienting
glimmer of the magical. She finds in magical realism a desire for the

existence of a separate raced space, which celebrates the grotesque and carnivalesque.

Examining texts such as Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo, Ralph Ellisons

A Coupla Scalped Indians, and stories in Tours The Portable Promised Land,

she argues that this space, which lays like a palimpsest over the US landscape,

constitutes an African American Our America (generated from writer and

Cuban patriot Jose Marts rich notion) that enables African Americans, disempowered

by Jim Crow and segregation, to reassert themselves as agents through

the magic of artistic self- expression and self- fashioning in ways that the American

mainstream cannot control or subvert.

Begoa Simal-Gonzlez, one of the authors of Uncertain Mirrors, has written

an essay on the intersections between magical realism and Asian American literature.

In her essay, Simal- Gonzlez traces the different types of magical realism

in Asian American texts, including those written during the ethnic revival of the

1970s and later novels by Amy Tan, Alvin Lu, and Karen Tei Yamashita. In her

exploration of magical realist moments in those texts, she uses William Spindlers

taxonomy to show how these works exemplify the metaphysical, anthropological,

and ontological types of magical realism. According to Simal- Gonzlez, while

most magical realist fiction written by Asian American writers (most conspicuously

Tans novels) falls under the rubric of anthropological magic realism, following

Spindlers typology, Simal- Gonzlez contends that this is not always the

case and that a dangerous simplification (of an essentialist nature) underlies such

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Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Index

2666 (Bolao), 13, 266


Agamben, Giorgio, 261

Alegra, Fernando, 131, 150

Alexie, Sherman, 12, 195 96, 198, 200,

203 8

Allen, Paula Gunn, 176, 186, 198

Allende, Isabel, 69, 169, 264 65

Americanness, 12, 40, 133, 214

Anaya, Rudolfo, 263 64

anthropologization, 131 34, 136 37, 139,

141 44

Antigone, 99

Anzalda, Gloria, 8, 213, 223 25, 227, 233,

263

Apess, William, 194, 208

Arva, Eugene, 24, 135

Ashkenazi Jews, 42, 52

Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid), 9,

19, 25 36

Axolotl (Cortzar), 11, 153, 163, 170,

173

Badiou, Alain, 7

Bak, Hans, 182, 185

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 109, 110, 113, 196, 243,

256

Barthes, Roland, 241

Bearden, Romare, 111 12, 114


Beloved (Morrison)

gothic elements in, 244, 246 47, 249

Jewish literature and, 57

rememory and, 7

shamanic power in, 11, 156, 166 70

trauma and, 24, 55

Benito, Jess, 2, 141 42, 263

Benjamin, Walter, 31 32, 61, 156

Bergland, Rene L., 193 94

Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 249

Bhabha, Homi, 32, 58

Biagiotti, Luca, 229

Black Arts Movement, 246

Black Elk, 175 77, 185 87

Blessing on the Moon, A (Skibell), 47 51

Boehmer, Elleke, 42, 58

Bolao, Roberto, 13, 265 66

Book of Antecedents, The, 54, 63

Book of Recurrent Dreams, The, 54, 63

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

(Anzalda), 223

Borges, Jorge Luis, 129, 156

Bowers, Maggie Ann, 66, 68, 263

Brennan, Timothy, 127

Brent, Linda, 246

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The


(Daz)

Beli and the curse of love, 94 102

cursing difference, 106 7

Oscar and the curse of indifference,

102 6

transgression of the curse, 91 94

violence and, 10

Brogan, Cathy, 5

Brown, Allison E., 11, 193 208, 269

Blood Re(a)d: Native American

Literature and the Emergence of the

Mythic Real, 193 208

bruja, 31, 33

Buffalo Bill Cody, 11, 175 76, 219, 237

Buffalo Man, 199

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274 Index

Burlingame, Lori, 11 12, 175 87, 270

Mythic Realism, Dreams, and Prophecy

in James Welchs The Heartsong of

Charging Elk, 175 87

Butler, Judith, 97, 99, 101

Caliban, 107

Canon Fodder, 59

Carlson, Kathie, 74
Carmilla (LeFanu), 244, 249

Carpentier, Alejo

Latino literature and, 263

lo real maravilloso and, 124 26, 131

33, 138 39

magical and, 22 30, 142

shamanism in works of, 11, 156, 162

surrealism and, 38

trauma and, 22 25

Caruth, Cathy, 20 21

Castillo, Ana

Christianity and, 216

feminine in works of, 69, 220, 223 25

magical realism and, 223 27, 236 37,

263 64

the Other and, 213 14

shamanism in works of, 156 57, 159

So Far from Good, 11

Western culture and, 12, 226 27

Ceremony (Silko), 180, 199, 208

Chanady, Amaryll, 67, 124, 132, 134, 150

Charging Elk, 11 12, 175 87

Chasing Horse, Joseph, 186 87, 190

China Men (Kingston), 127

Chippewa Indians, 200 201, 203

Christabel (Coleridge), 244, 248 49


Cisneros, Sandra, 264 65

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 241

Cody, William. See Buffalo Bill Cody

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 244, 248

Companion to Magical Realism, A (Hart and

Ouyang), 2, 263

Connell, Liam, 132, 138

Conrad, Joseph, 105, 156

Cooper, James Fenimore, 193 94

Cortzar, Julio, 11, 130, 144, 156, 163, 173

Coulombe, Joseph L., 180, 183

Coupla Scalped Indians, A (Ellison), 10,

115

Cox, Karen Castellucci, 199 203

Coyote, 216, 220, 222, 238

Danow, David K., 111, 134, 142

Darznik, Jasmin, 70 71, 74

Daughters of the Stone (Llanos- Figueroa), 9,

19 25, 30 36

Dayan, Joan, 24, 37

Days of Obligation (Rodriguez), 265

de la Campa, Romn, 13, 259 67, 270

Latinos and Magic Realism: Promised

Land or Convoluted History,

259 67

de la Torre, Miguel, 34 35
Delbaere- Garant, Jeanne, 110 11, 213 14,

216

Deloria, Ella Cara, 181

Denman, Hugh, 43

Derrida, Jacques, 6, 104 6

Dhaen, Theo L., 132, 140, 243, 246, 256

Daz, Junot, 10, 13, 91 107, 264 65

diffrance, 104 6

Divakaruni, Chitra, 127, 137, 140

Dix, Andrew, 195 96

Donahue, James J., 176 77, 183

Douglass, Frederick, 246

Dow, James, 156

Dracula, 247 49

dramatic shocks of magic, 4

DuBois, W. E. B., 33

Durix, Jean- Pierre, 127

Echevarria, Roberto Gonzlez, 125

Eisenhower, Dwight, 220

Ellison, Ralph, 10, 115 16

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6

Erdrich, Louise, 2, 12, 163, 193, 196, 199

204, 208, 216

Erikson, Kai, 22

Evans, Stephen F., 195

Everything Is Illuminated (Foer), 51 57, 63


Fa Mu Lan, 128 30, 140

Faris, Wendy B., 155 70, 270

on basis of magical realism, 2, 58, 67

69, 197

on history and magical realism, 39, 59,

75, 259

on Jewish magical realism, 41 42

on realism in magical realism, 68 70

on representing the unrepresentable,

135

Scheherezades Children, 124

shamanism and, 11

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Index 275

Third World literatures and, 127

We, the Shamans, Eat Tobacco and

Sing: Figures of Shamanic Power

in US and Latin American Magical

Realism, 155 70

on women and magical realism, 70 71,

135

Felman, Shoshana, 21, 29

Ferguson, Suzanne, 176 77, 179, 182, 184

Fiddler on the Roof, 53

Fielder, Leslie, 246


First World, 12, 214

Foer, Jonathan Safran, 9, 51 57, 63

folk identity, 53, 56

folk magic, 31, 33, 42 43, 118 19

folk tales, 23 24

Fools Crow (Welch), 176, 180 81, 184 85

Foucault, Michel, 36, 94

Francis, Angela J., 10, 109 20, 270

Searching for Rhythm and Freedom:

African American Magical Realism

and the Creation of a Home

Country, 109 20

Free, Anna, 68, 74

Freneau, Philip, 193 94

Freud, Sigmund, 20 21

Friedlander, Saul, 46, 60 61

frontera, la, 213, 223

Fuentes, Carlos, 156, 163, 173, 256

fuk, 10, 91 96, 107, 265

Gael Bryant, Cedric, 246 47, 249

Garca Cristina, 263

Garca Mrquez, Gabriel

Asian- American magical realism and,

123 24, 133 34

book- within- the- book, 54

faith and, 27
folk magic and, 42

history and, 36

importance to magical realism genre, 57,

69, 123 24

Jewish magical realism and, 42, 57

Latino magical realism and, 263 64

Macondo, 52, 229

Nahai and, 66

on nonrealism vs. magical realism, 23

postcolonial and, 41

shamanism and, 156, 161, 163

See also One Hundred Years of Solitude

geographical fallacy, 132 35, 143, 148,

151

Georgi- Findlay, Brigitte, 184

German postexpressionism, 2

Gide, Andr, 156

Gilligan, Carol, 75

Gimpel the Fool (Singer), 43, 45, 62

Glissant, douard, 3 4, 13, 101 2

Goddu, Teresa, 246, 258

God of Small Things, The (Roy), 94

Goldberg, Myla, 54

Gomez, Jewelle, 246

Gmez- Vega, Ibis, 9, 65 87, 270

Flying to Save Her Life: Bad Luck, Bad


Choices, and Bad Mothers in Gina

B. Nahais Moonlight on the Avenue

of Faith, 65 87

Gordon, Avery, 1

Green Grass, Running Water (King), 214,

216, 218, 220 21, 236

Grossman, David, 39, 47 52, 55, 61, 63

Gubar, Susan, 47 48, 57, 61

Halberstam, Judith, 247

Harding, Rachel, 34 35

Harlem Renaissance, 246

Harris, Wilson, 11, 156, 158

Hart, Stephen, 2, 263

Hartman, Geoffrey, 46, 60 61

Haselstein, Ulla, 177, 182 83, 189

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 193, 208

Heartsong of Charging Elk, The (Welch),

175 87

Hegel, Georg W. F., 106

Hendrix, Jimi, 206, 208

Hiawatha (Longfellow), 177

Hietala, Thomas, 215

Hijuelos, Oscar, 263

History of Love, The (Krauss), 54 55

Hollywood, 216, 218 19, 221, 265

Horsman, Reginald, 215, 227


House of Seven Gables, The, 244

House of the Spirits (Allende), 169

Hower, Edward, 66

Hundred Secret Services, The (Tan), 128,

130 31, 140

imperialism, 41, 134, 139

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Brent),

246

inset books, 54 55, 63

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Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

276 Index

Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory

and the Engraving of Trauma (Van

Der Kolk and Van Der Hart), 20

Irving, Washington, 193 94

Jameson, Elizabeth, 227 30

Jameson, Frederic, 125 26, 136

Janet, Pierre, 20 21

Jewish American fiction

Blessing on the Moon, A, 47 51

cultural history and, 13

Everything Is Illuminated, 51 56

Holocaust representation, 46 47

magical realism and, 9, 41 42, 56 58

magic in Jewish culture, 42 43


postcolonial and, 41 42

Jim Crow, 10, 115

Johnson, Robert, 206 8

Joplin, Janis, 206, 208

Joyce, James, 156

Joy Luck Club, The (Tan), 127

Kabbalah, 42 43

Karim, Persis M., 70

Kincaid, Jamaica, 9, 25 36

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 94

King, Thomas, 12, 213 14, 216 23, 227,

236 37

Kingdom of this World, The (Carpentier), 2,

11, 22 23, 25, 27, 30, 156, 162

Kingston, Maxine Hong, 10, 123, 127 31,

133, 137, 140, 143, 145

Kochininako, 198 99

Krauss, Nicole, 9, 54 55, 62

Lacan, Jacques, 249 50

Lakota Indians, 175 87, 207

Last Demon (Singer), 44, 56

Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 194,

216, 238

LeFanu, Sheridan, 244, 249

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 215, 227 28

Llanos- Figueroa, Dhalma, 9, 19 25


Lone Ranger, 216, 222, 238

Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,

The (Dix), 195 96, 200, 203, 207

Lpez, Alfred J., 41 42

Lost Steps, The (Carpentier), 142

Love Medicine (Erdrich), 199 204, 208

Lyotard, Jean- Franois, 196

Macandal, 11, 23 30, 156, 162 63, 169

Macondo, 52, 94, 157 58, 229, 264

magical irruptions, 1 10, 13, 19, 30, 38,

129, 262

Magical Realism: History, Theory, and

Community (Faris and Zamora), 2, 11,

58, 68, 259

Magnolia, Tiffany, 69 70, 72 73

Malamud, Bernard, 39, 44 45

Malchow, H. L., 246

Mama Day (Naylor), 241 55

Manzanas, Ana Mara, 2, 141 42

Mart, Jos, 10, 109 10, 120

Massacre at Wounded Knee, 11, 175, 180

82, 186 87

Maus (Spiegelman), 47, 62

May, Rollo, 176

Mbembe, Achille, 5

McGahey, Robert, 171


McMullin, Stanley E., 214

McOndo (Fuguet), 260, 264 65

Melquades, 11, 156 59

Mendelsohn, Daniel, 61

mestizos, 131 33, 138, 147, 223 27, 237, 263

metafictional dimensions, 54, 159, 166,

205 6

Midnights Children (Rushdie), 69

Mistress of Spices, The (Divakaruni), 127, 140

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (Nahai)

early reviews, 65 66

family curse, 71 74

feminism and, 70

Frulein Claude, 80 83

guilt in, 84 86

Iran and, 70 71

magical realism and, 66 69

magic in, 65 66, 78 79

Miriams sense of smell, 67 68

mothers and daughters in, 74 78

Roxannas first flight, 78 79

rural setting, 68 69

sexuality in, 83 84

suffering in, 79 80

women in, 65, 69 72

Morrison, Toni
Canon Fodder, 5 6

folk magic and, 42

gothicism and, 244, 246 47

hidden stories and, 3

magical realism and, 2, 11, 121, 133, 244

playing in the dark, 4

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Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Index 277

race in works of, 96, 115

rememory and, 6 7, 13

shamanism and, 166

violence in works of, 96

women in works of, 69

See also Beloved; Song of Solomon

Mouat, Jeremy, 227 30

Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 10, 110, 113 14

Nabokov, Vladimir, 156

NAFTA (North American Free Trade

Agreement), 139

Nahai, Gina B., 9, 65 87

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

(Jacobs), 246

Naylor, Gloria, 2, 13, 201 2, 241 48, 251,

253 55, 257, 258

Negri, Antonio, 261


nerds, 102 7, 266

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 249 51

Nuestra Amrica, 109 10, 117, 119

OHiggins is an Araucanian (Kilapan), 267

Okri, Ben, 42, 44, 143

Olmos, Margarite Fernndez, 3, 14

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garca

Mrquez)

criticism, 66

ending, 54

history and, 36

Latin America and, 138

Macondo, 52, 229, 264

magical realism and, 2, 36, 69, 123

Remedios the Beauty, 169

shamanism and, 11

shock of the new in, 66

surrealism and, 38

trauma and, 24

See also Macondo; Melquades

Optiz, Andrea, 177

Oshn, 27, 30 32

OSullivan, John, 215

Other, the, 5, 7, 12, 92, 100, 105, 130, 134,

137, 139 40, 177, 213 14

Ouyang, Wen- chin, 2, 41, 263


Ozick, Cynthia, 39, 44 45, 60

Pagan Rabbi (Ozick), 45

Perez, Richard, 1 14, 91 107, 269

Flashes of Transgression: The Fuk,

Negative Aesthetics, and the Future

in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar

Wao by Junot Daz, 91 107

Pinochet, Augusto, 265, 267

Plenty Horses, 182

Portable Promised Land, The (Tour), 10,

110 11, 119

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and

Violence (Butler), 97

primitive tropicalism, 131, 142, 150

Proust, Marcel, 156

QueAng- QueAng, 241, 243

Reed, Ishmael, 10, 110, 113

Reilly, Donald, 13, 241 55, 270

Mama Day: Where Gothicism and

Magical Realism Meet, 241 55

rememory, 7, 13

Rodriguez, Richard, 265

Rody, Caroline, 9, 39 58, 271

Jewish Post- Holocaust Fiction and the

Magical Realist Turn, 39 58

Rogmann, Horst, 131 32, 148


Roh, Frank, 68 69, 124 25

Roskies, David G., 53

Rowlandson, Mary, 193 94, 217

Roy, Arundhati, 94 95

Rulfo, Juan, 2, 11, 129, 156

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, 183, 188, 189

Rushdie, Salman, 57, 69, 124

Said, Edward, 5, 137

Saldvar, Jos David, 109, 133, 263

Sanders, Karla J., 216

Sandn, Lyn Di Iorio, 1 14, 19 36, 269

Trauma, Magic, and Genealogy:

Moments of Magical Realism

in Daughters of the Stone by

Dhalma Llanos- Figueroa and The

Autobiography of My Mother by

Jamaica Kincaid, 19 36

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (Shange), 110,

118, 133

Savage Detectives (Bolao), 13, 266

Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 193, 208

Schler, Bo, 195 96

Schroeder, Shannin, 12, 213 37, 263,

271

Lifting the Weight of the Continent:

Magical Realism on the North


American Landscape, 213 37

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Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

278 Index

Schulz, Bruno, 47, 60, 61

Schwartz, Howard, 42

See Under: Love (Grossman), 47, 51, 55, 63

shamanistic power

Beloved and, 11, 156, 166 70

Carpentier and, 11, 156, 162

Castillo and, 156 57, 159

Garca Mrquez and, 156, 161, 163

Morrison and, 166

One Hundred Years of Solitude and, 11

Shange, Ntozake, 110, 118, 133

Shanley, Kathryn W., 176, 184

Sharp, Paul, 228 30

Shawl, The (Ozick), 60

Sheldon, Mary F., 176

Silko, Leslie Marmon, 8, 12 13, 124, 133,

180, 196, 198 99, 203, 208

Simal- Gonzlez, Begoa, 2, 10, 123 44,

271

Of Magical Gourds and Secret Senses:

The Uses of Magical Realism

in Asian American Literature,


123 44

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 39, 42 45, 51, 53,

56, 59, 62

Skibell, Joseph, 9, 47 51, 55, 61 63

Slemon, Stephen, 127, 214, 234, 243, 251,

256, 260

So Far from God (Castillo), 11, 156, 159,

214, 224, 226, 236

Song of Solomon (Morrison), 115 17, 119

Spider Grandmother, 199

Spiegelman, Art, 39, 47, 49, 62

Spielberg, Steven, 241

Spindler, William, 10, 125 27, 131, 144

Spirit of Carnival, The (Danow), 111

Spitta, Silvia, 263

Spivak, Gayatri, 8, 261

Stanley, George F. G., 228, 235

Stern, Steve, 9, 54

Talmud, 42, 47, 52

Tan, Amy, 2, 10, 66, 127 28, 130, 133,

137, 140

Taussig, Michael, 8, 170

Third World literatures, 42, 53, 127, 132,

261

Thompson, Robert Farris, 3

Thought Woman, 199, 216, 220, 238


Torres- Saillant, Silvio, 107

Tour, 10, 109 12, 117 19

trauma theory

literary analysis and, 20 22

magical realism and, 22 25

Trujillo Molina, Rafael Lenidas, 10, 91,

93 97, 100, 265

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 213 17, 221,

227 30, 235 37

Uncertain Mirrors (Benito, Manzanas, and

Simal- Gonzlez), 2, 10, 141 42, 263

vampirism, 246 48, 250, 258

Van Der Hart, Onno, 20 22

Van Der Kolk, Bessel, 20 22

Vickroy, Laurie, 27, 32

violence

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and, 10,

91 97, 100 105

colonization and, 41, 45, 227 28

fuk and, 91 92

magical realism and, 24 25, 55, 58,

132

memory and, 22

narrative and, 3 4

Native Americans and, 194, 196, 207 8

the Other and, 5


racial, 132, 177, 187, 215 16

sex and, 233

Vizenor, Gerald, 195 96

Wakan Tanka, 177, 180, 182, 186

Warnes, Christopher, 40 41, 44 45, 56 57,

59, 143, 147, 171, 173

Welch, James, 11, 175 87

Weltanschauung, 126 27

Westrum, Dexter, 184

What the Crow Said (Kroetsch), 214, 229

33, 235 36

Wheelock, Carter, 129

White Buffalo Calf Woman, 185 87, 190

Williams, Raymond, 236, 240

Wilson, Rawdon, 132, 147 48, 165, 241

43, 255

Wilson, Robert R., 230, 239

witches, 31 33, 98, 100, 116

Within the Kingdom of This (Magnolia), 69

Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 123, 127

31, 137, 140

Wong, Shawn, 10, 123, 140

Wright, George, 205

Wright, Richard, 246

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Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299


Index 279

Yadegaran, Jessica, 79

Yamashita, Karen Tei, 10, 139 43, 151

Yellow Woman, 198 99, 203

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit

(Marmon), 199

Yemay, 27, 30, 38

Yiddish, 42, 44, 53, 56

Yiddishkeit, 39

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 2, 41, 58, 67 68,

71, 127, 135, 257, 259

iek, Slavoj, 135

Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

Copyrighted Material - ISBN 9781137293299

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