The interconnection between nature and history in US ethnic magical realist novels

Mohsen Hanif,Tahereh Rezaei,Carol Colatrella

doi:10.1080/23311983.2018.1500666

Abstract

This article examines the interrelated reflections of (American) nature and history in six American magical realist novels mainly written in the 1980s. For this purpose, the authors explore Louise ...

Highlights

Magical realism is widely diverse, deeply metamorphic and thoroughly context-bound
Do we all develop a nostalgic view of nature and lament the destruction of the face of the earth? Is our perception of nature affected by the historical experiences we have passed through? How is this perception depicted in novels by US ethnic novelists? To find an answer to these questions, we studied six novels, widely known as magical realist, written in the 1980s about the experiences of Native Americans, Black Americans, and Chinese Americans in the American landscape
The narrators in Tracks and Bearheart, the two selected novels that draw much on Native American experience in American landscape, bestow so much sublimated magical powers on nature that is unparalleled in the other novels discussed here

Summary

Introduction

Magical realism is widely diverse, deeply metamorphic and thoroughly context-bound. it has the power to shape both the themes and style of a literary work. This article examines the interrelated representations of (American) nature and history as incorporated by the intra-diegetic narrators (storytellers) within six novels of the 1980s by six US novelists who have professed close affinities with three different ethnicities To this end, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club have been selected. Does Nanapush tell Lulu about the Morrisays, and he recounts the entire communal history to re-shape Lulu’s identity Such novels often depict the domestic lives of their characters, yet at another level, their writers undertake to rewrite the geography and history of their ethnicity from their own points of view and in response to the official historical documents. Readers may realize different, and at times opposing, perceptions of identity as mirrored in spatio-temporal construction of the Americas as depicted in these novels

Discussion

Conclusion