Destructive Kinopoetics

Abstract

Chapter Three introduces the first type of kinopoetics, a “destructive kinopoetics”, coinciding with the migrant figure of the nomad. This kinopoetics relates to the genre of Magic Realism, wherein authors destroy the experience of time and space, and displace the centrality of a unified, place-based social milieu to make way for a divergent, mobile, and decentered world. The resulting idea is to show a world that transcends the bounded limitations of the nation-state, and places a primacy or privilege on the convergence of two worlds into one field of vision – what Salman Rushdie calls a “stereoscopic vision.” Here, the nomad’s experience of the world that is otherwise contradictory or paradoxical is given credence in the text, showing us how the migrant often has to negotiate between two versions of reality. As Wendy Faris argues, magic realism “provides a fictional ground in which to imagine alternative narrative visions of agency and history” (Faris 2004: 136); and this is often done by empowering migrant subjects to liberate themselves from the constraints of time and space. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Chitra Banerjee Divakruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997) offer helpful test cases for this discussion.