Marvelous Realism, Feminism, and Mulatto Aesthetics: Erna Brodber’s Myal

Abstract

This chapter is occasioned by the encounter between marvelous realism and postmodernism in the North American academy. In some ways, it takes up familiar questions of how the “local” is consumed “globally.” For instance, which aspects of texts cross over easily, and which are detained at the border?1 What are the consequences of assimilating postcolonial critiques of realism, such as marvelous realism, to postmodern ones? What aspects of resistant and/or oppositional agency may be left out as a result of this transaction? These questions are further tangled by the global market’s hyper-canonization of marvelous and magic realism as ideal forms of postcolonial writing—a canonization that has generated several postcolonial and/ or Marxist rejections of the forms, on grounds that magic and marvelous realist texts lend themselves to co-optive, assimilationist, or dehistoricizing projects, whether within postmodernism or official postcolonial nationalisms.2 Fredric Jameson has observed in “On Magic Realism in Film” that the films he studied “presuppose extensive prior knowledge of their historical framework in such a way as to eschew all exposition and also to preempt the traditional narrative gesture of the beginning” (304).