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Moments of magical realism in U.S. ethnic literatures / edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandn
p. cm.
(Literature) 3. Ethnic groups in literature. I. Di Iorio Sandn, Lyn, 1964 II. Perez,
Richard, 1969
PS153.M56M66 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Caroline Rody
by Junot Daz 91
Richard Perez
5 Searching for Rhythm and Freedom: African American
Angela J. Francis
viii Contents
Wendy Faris
Lori Burlingame
Allison E. Brown
Shannin Schroeder
Donald J. Reilly
Index 273
INTRODUCTION
in US Ethnic Literatures
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
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,
the myriad situations and conditions of contemporary life in the United States.
realism and a realism ideologically coded by the conceit that it faithfully represents
equally conceal and flatten many of the social complexities inherent in the lives
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
realist moment, effect, or irruption, then, represents a place of both opacity and
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,
address most of those whose work delves in such magical realist effects.
experts on magical realism and figures in US ethnic and trans- American literatures
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
the ghostly content of race, class, and gender. Hidden stories and erased memories
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
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 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
this reflects the fact that these writers are experimenting all at once with this
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
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
or difficult- to- approach aspect of reality that must be rendered in different terms
indicative of terrible colonial truths underlying the nature of New World realities
For Glissant, Caribbean and minority texts often irrupt into modernity11 or
experience irruptions because they have not been able to pass through the longer
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,
violent foundations of social life. It is as if the shock of magic lies in the revelation
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
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
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
what Toni Morrison will call, for example, playing in the dark that is, imaginative
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
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
into a knowledge- producing form of fiction. Brogan states, The saving movement
traumatic silence into language. Through acts of narrative revision which are
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
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
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
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
the archive, the power to decide who must die and the power to interpret (or
elide undigestible events. In this violent exchange, the ethnic Other is rendered
socially dead and often conceals within his or her consciousness eaten that
changes the essays title from the more realistic Canon Fodder to the magical
US ethnic and minority writers recuperate and access these events and
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
endeavors and serious scholarship.20 Where must such an effort begin? Where
author and critic to extrapolate this seething historical and social presence? For
Morrison, the opacity suggested by absent presences is where ethnic writers must
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
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
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.
States very historical portrayal of itself, in its national and social tenets (freedom,
young not because, as Ralph Waldo Emerson argues, we live in the influential
his active turning away from Africa and other parts of the Americas.22 The result
planned that its presence aims to arrest us with intentionality and purpose.
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
gradations and ways of being that are sublimated by whiteness. Enter, moreover,
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
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
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.
events into an active consciousness. Morrison is not talking about a site focused
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
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
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
through the act of writing itself. Taussig compares this ineluctable relation of
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.
from above.28
Being and knowledge of traumatic histories are not an archival supposition but
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
strange or hidden sits at the center of New World histories, offering in Gloria
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
four parts: Part I: Traumatic Inheritances: The Psychic Life of Magic; Part II:
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
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
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
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
Caroline Rodys essay Jewish Post- Holocaust Fiction and the Magical Realist
serve the imaginative will to reanimate buried histories, to memorialize and even
resurrect the dead. Her essay contends that in contemporary Jewish American
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
magical real future. In Junot Dazs The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the
agent of destruction. This curse, embodied in the novel by Rafael Trujillo, the
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
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
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.
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,
Cuban patriot Jose Marts rich notion) that enables African Americans, disempowered
the magic of artistic self- expression and self- fashioning in ways that the American
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
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
Index
203 8
141 44
Antigone, 99
263
19, 25 36
173
Badiou, Alain, 7
256
rememory and, 7
(Anzalda), 223
102 6
violence and, 10
Brogan, Cathy, 5
bruja, 31, 33
274 Index
Caliban, 107
Canon Fodder, 59
Carlson, Kathie, 74
Carmilla (LeFanu), 244, 249
Carpentier, Alejo
33, 138 39
surrealism and, 38
trauma and, 22 25
Caruth, Cathy, 20 21
Castillo, Ana
263 64
Ouyang), 2, 263
115
19 25, 30 36
259 67
de la Torre, Miguel, 34 35
Delbaere- Garant, Jeanne, 110 11, 213 14,
216
Denman, Hugh, 43
diffrance, 104 6
Dracula, 247 49
DuBois, W. E. B., 33
Erikson, Kai, 22
69, 197
75, 259
135
shamanism and, 11
Index 275
Realism, 155 70
135
folk tales, 23 24
Country, 109 20
Freud, Sigmund, 20 21
faith and, 27
folk magic and, 42
history and, 36
69, 123 24
Nahai and, 66
postcolonial and, 41
151
German postexpressionism, 2
Gilligan, Carol, 75
Goldberg, Myla, 54
of Faith, 65 87
Gordon, Avery, 1
Harding, Rachel, 34 35
175 87
Hower, Edward, 66
246
276 Index
Janet, Pierre, 20 21
Everything Is Illuminated, 51 56
Holocaust representation, 46 47
Kabbalah, 42 43
Kincaid, Jamaica, 9, 25 36
236 37
Kochininako, 198 99
216, 238
129, 262
82, 186 87
Mbembe, Achille, 5
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 61
205 6
early reviews, 65 66
family curse, 71 74
feminism and, 70
Frulein Claude, 80 83
guilt in, 84 86
Iran and, 70 71
rural setting, 68 69
sexuality in, 83 84
suffering in, 79 80
Morrison, Toni
Canon Fodder, 5 6
Index 277
rememory and, 6 7, 13
Agreement), 139
(Jacobs), 246
Mrquez)
criticism, 66
ending, 54
history and, 36
shamanism and, 11
surrealism and, 38
trauma and, 24
Oshn, 27, 30 32
Violence (Butler), 97
rememory, 7, 13
Roy, Arundhati, 94 95
Autobiography of My Mother by
Jamaica Kincaid, 19 36
118, 133
271
278 Index
Schwartz, Howard, 42
shamanistic power
271
56, 59, 62
256, 260
Stern, Steve, 9, 54
137, 140
261
trauma theory
violence
fuk and, 91 92
132
memory and, 22
narrative and, 3 4
Weltanschauung, 126 27
33, 235 36
43, 255
Yadegaran, Jessica, 79
(Marmon), 199
Yiddishkeit, 39