- Summary
- In this study I investigate the different incarnations of what I call magicorealism in the following contemporary U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film: Ana Castillo's So Far From God; Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo ; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses; Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust; and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In chapter one, titled "Hybridity, Mimesis, and Ethnicity ," I construct a critical frame that defines the specific storytelling structures that allow a given text to convey a transdiasporic, subaltern-identified magicorealist worldview. I have discovered a number of different magic realist modes, each of which is associated with a predominant term: the Euro-Spanish ancestral mode, I identify as "magical realism," was employed by late fifteenth-century conquestadores who wrote empire-building narratives to justify the genocide and sexual oppression of the marvelous (savage and perverse) New World other. And the transdiasporic subaltern mode, I identify as magicorealism, currently employed by late twentieth-century U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial writers and directors to construct globespanning narratives of resistance that not only make this subaltern mode sovereign-turning the "other" into the subject-but that do not exclude dialogical play with European narrative modes (the picaresque, for example). Chapter two, titled " Countercinematic Magicorealisms," details the narratological configurations and attendant ideologies that inform directors Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust and screenplay writer Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. In chapter three, "The Chicano Magicorealist Auto-bio-graphé," I explore how Oscar Acosta creates in his Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo a self-as-character whose emergence into a mestizo identity opens his eyes to a magicorealized subject/object relationship. Chapter four, entitled "Chicana Engendered Magicorealism" focuses on the contractual codes Ana Castillo employs in her novel So Far From God to subvert and re-work primarily heterosexist uses of magicorealism. In chapter five, "Magicorealist Re-Conquistas of Space," I map Salman Rushdie's construction of a resitant, magicorealist "fourthspace."
- Format
- Book
- Author/Creator
- Aldama, Frederick Luis, 1969-
- Published
- 1999
- Notes
-
Contains separate chapters on So far from God by Ana Castillo, Autobiography of a brown buffalo by Oscar Acosta and Salman Rushdie.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-218).
Photocopy. Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Dissertation Services, 2002. 22 cm.
Dissertations and Theses
