Global fantasy–glocal imagination

Abstract

Globally speaking, fantasy literature has been one of the major literary growth sectors over the last two or three decades. It has enjoyed widespread and serious critical reception while fantastic stories have frequently been rendered into commercially hugely successful films. In contrast to this, there has been either little critical concern with fantasy writing in the New Literatures in English or it has been addressed merely as the remains of a precolonial mythical consciousness making incursions into the world of the realistic storyteller (see, for example, the reception of Amos Tutuola’s work). My paper argues that the fantastic in the New Literatures in English is located at the interface of global and local concerns and creates a glocal literary discourse that establishes its very own imagi/Nation. Prose narratives from India and its diaspora as well as recent Māori writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand will illustrate my thesis and testify that fantasy writing in the New Literatures in English transcends/replaces the diverse binaries at the centre of the postcolonial literary discourse.