Magical Realism Research Articles

Capitalist modernity and gendered subalternity in contemporary Muslim fiction: Saudi Women in Raja Alem’s Fatma: A Novel of Arabia (2002)

ABSTRACT Contemporary Muslim women’s writing can help to shed light on how the ostensibly incommensurate relationship between the conditions of women’s lives and gendered forms of social reproduction in modern Muslim societies are intimately connected with the uneven development of capitalist modernity, especially in oil-rich states such as Saudi Arabia. This paper traces the ways in which gendered forms of social reproduction and patriarchal oppression are mediated but also contested in the form of a text from modern Saudi Arabia: Raja Alem’s Fatma A Novel of Arabia. It considers how this novel combines elements of magic, fantasy, and realism to foreground how the oppression of Muslim women and their relegation to a position of gendered subalternity is a crucial determinant in the combined and uneven development of petro-capitalist modernity in the modern Muslim world. By drawing on Sufism in a modern narrative of so-called magical realism, the novel, I argue, contests gender roles in contemporary capitalist modernity by offering a view that stems from the Islamic tradition but does not align with patriarchy and capitalist ideology; on the other hand, it registers the coexistence of the religious and the magical within the modern world.

What Makes a Text a Magical Realist Work? - A Study Using Family Resemblance and Genre Theory

Magical Realism is one of literatures most elusive and debated concepts, as it can be easily confused with other related genres. There is an ongoing debate about whether to label it as a genre or mode of narrative. Magical Realism is an International contemporary genre with its roots in Germany, while it became popularised and pioneered in South America. Over the years, critics have had issues defining the characteristics of Magical Realism as it subtly overlaps with other similar genres like surrealism, fantasy, science fiction, and gothic. Family Resemblance theory explains the overlapping resemblances of almost similar genres using Genre theory. This paper explores the binding relationship between Magical Realism and other genres. Later, they resemble yet differ in detail using their core characteristics. The paper also provides a comparative study on selected genres and studies the concept of genres, their construction, and their evolution. Textual analysis methodology is used in this article to understand the characteristics of magical realism in the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. Further analysis of how the novel differs from the other genres is also studied using textual analysis. Genre theory can be analysed to trace the origin and evolution of a genre throughout the years and how they are arbitrary and are constantly misused by authors.

Manifestations of femininity in Mahmoud Fahmy's drawings

This tagged research deals with the manifestations of femininity in Mahmoud Fahmy's drawings by studying and monitoring the presence and how women were represented in the drawings of the artist Mahmoud Fahmy. Through the drawings of the expatriate Iraqi artist, Mahmoud Fahmy, in highlighting the manifestations of beauty for women, which constitute a formal characteristic that appears through the body, and Fahmy depicts it in an atmosphere of realism at times and magical realism at other times, as the research consists of four chapters. Through the following question: Did femininity appear in the drawings of the artist Mahmoud Fahmy? The importance of the research is that it sheds light on the manifestations of femininity in the drawings of this artist.The theoretical framework dealt with two sections, the first talks about the concept of femininity and the female in the ancient and contemporary arts, and the second section dealt with the artist Mahmoud Fahmy and his artistic style while coming up with indicators for this theoretical framework. From the artist's drawings, and the research concluded with the results and conclusions, including:1. The woman's body and her femininity is the primary inspiration and basis for the focus of the work. It is the hero of the story and its inspiration for the artistic themes of the artist Mahmoud Fahmy.2. Heritage, belonging, originality, place and neighborhoods are important characteristics of the artist Mahmoud Fahmy.3. In addition to the conclusions, recommendations and proposals to reach the goal of the research, which is to identify the manifestations of femininity in Mahmoud Fahmy's drawings.

From Social Realism to Magic Realism

Entire layers of fiction in retrospective light might escape the attention of modern literary criticism. Russian speaking writers and poets living in Kazakhstan introduce elements of Kazakh culture into their work: these are details of Kazakh life, song culture, and the bright imagery inherent in Kazakh literature and its unique artistic flavor. Regional Russian literature, connected by roots with Slavic literature, contributed to the development and mutual enrichment of literary ties between Kazakhstan and Russia. Already by the beginning of the 1920s, two directions in the approach to the Kazakh theme emerged: a contemplative attitude towards the historical past of the Kazakh people, the desire to idealize antiquity in a traditionally romantic sense, and a progressive perception and coverage of everything connected with the life of the Kazakhs.
 Russian-language literature in Kazakhstan has gone from socialist realism to magical realism. It is closely connected with the reality, history and traditions of the ethnic groups of Kazakhstan. Historical and revolutionary themes were developed in the spirit of the dominant ideology. The range of material covered included the period of collectivization before the development of virgin lands and the problems of the scientific and technological revolution. Magical realism gives literary texts a unique originality.

Scrutinising the Moon: Randa Jarrar’s “The Lunatic’s Eclipse” Under a Postmodern Lens

This paper aims to investigate the short story “The Lunatic’s Eclipse” by the Arab-American Randa Jarrar and explain the postmodern techniques represented through the different functions of the moon. The study is qualitative research that employs postmodern strategies of magic realism, metafiction, carnivalesque, and intertextuality as the study's methodology. Through these strategies, the story blurs the boundaries between reality, magic, and fiction and unites them in one entity to highlight themes of freedom, happiness, and self-reliance. Therefore, the study relies on postmodern theorists' ideas and theories on these strategies, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon, Franz Koh, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gerard Genette, and William Gass. The moon is also employed as a structure for the story and a theme that unites all the parts of the story together. The characters are also given names that mean different phases of the moon in Arabic. Jarrar uses the moon to resist stereotyping Arab women as weak and submissive.

Los rasgos característicos del realismo mágico en la novela Žluté oči vedou domů de Markéta Pilátová

The study deals with a comparison between the novel Žluté oči vedou domů (2007) written by Markéta Pilátová and one variation of the aesthetic concept of magical realism. The story based on author’s own experience is focused on several stories of the principal characters of the novel that are living in different surroundings. A significant portion of the novel unfolds in South America, where the tension between reality and the supernatural is perceptible. The goal of the article is to show thematically specific passages of the novel and analyse them on the basis of the defined characteristic features of magical realism. The theoretical base of this article is formed by the ideas about magical realism by Emil Volek (1990), summarized in the article Realismo mágico entre la modernidad y la postmodernidad: hacia una remodelización cultural y discursiva de la nueva narrativa hispanoamericana. Volek’s article focuses on Latin American literature; however, his theses about magical realism are universally applicable.

Realism, Myth and Spiritual Mestizaje in Las malas by Camila Sosa Villada

Abstract: By reclaiming the power of self-definition and the use of the term travesti to designate their unique experience within the Latin American cultural, economic, and political context, travesti intellectuals have fought the dehumanization of their personhood. In her novel Las malas , the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada not only reclaims the right to self-definition but also connects the realistic accounts of human rights violations against travesti subjects with the spiritual, mythical, and religious roots of the travesti experience. To make these connections, Sosa Villada appropriates magical realism, a literary mode that provides the space to naturalize the presence of travesti subjects as protagonists of folktales, miracles, and religious narratives while denouncing violence against travesti bodies. In this way, the author unveils and corrects the dichotomic nature of cultural narratives that exclude travesti and trans subjects from religious and cultural spaces in Latin America. Moreover, by rewriting folktales and religious narratives, and by situating travestis as protagonists of narratives of miracles, Sosa Villada deploys "spiritual mestizaje" that dignifies and humanizes travesti personhood, opening previously proscribed spaces for these agents. In this way, Sosa Villada not only disrupts and expands the literary tradition of magical realism by adding the travesti experience to the predominantly heteronormative corpus of magical-realist narratives but exercises religious agency.

Exploring Domestic Violence and Child Abuse in Select Novels of Toni Morrison

Violence against African American females, young and old, is an irresistible concern in the novels of Toni Morrison. Her best fictional pieces, ‘The Bluest Eye’, ‘Beloved’, and ‘God Help the Child’ are the vibrant spotlight of domestic violence and child abuse in variegated natures. Toni Morrison has dealt profusely with all sorts of child maltreatment in her oeuvre. In many of her narratives, Morrison weaves a tangled web of childhood trauma stories, in which all the characters have suffered some kind of abuse like racial discrimination, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, emotional and psychological abuse, molestation, sexual exploitation, verbal abuse, etc. She shows how the child’s exposure to traumatic experiences has far-reaching negative effects on adulthood, such as psychological, emotional, behavioral, and social. Morrison explores the curse of the past, the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, and its hold on the present, through the sociocultural phenomenon. Racism and intra-racial discrimination based on skin color result in childhood trauma. The sexual abuse of Pecola, the girl desiring the bluest eye by her drunken father has been very vividly picturized in the backdrop of racial conflict in ‘The Bluest Eye’. Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ fictionized the gruesome murder of an infant with a jigsaw by her mother, Sethe only to avoid escaping a slave. God Help the Child chronicled the ramifications of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a black girl with dark skin being born to light-skinned parents. Moreover, magic realism, socio-political aspects, and Toni Morrison’s lucid narratives provide ultra energy promoting her vivid message.

Phantasmagorical realism in Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2021)

This article proposes a close analysis of the film Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2021). It begins by situating the film within a broader trend in contemporary East/South East Asian and Latin American cinemas, which incorporates elements of the phantasmagorical into an aesthetics of realism. The combination of these seemingly contradictory concepts gives rise to a sophisticated interplay of temporalities. This interplay comprises the present phenomenological reality, layers of the past and the realm of memory associated with posthumous presences, and the unusual occurrences that may belong to the future. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘phantasmagorical realism’, a recurring theme in Weerasethakul’s cinema. This concept is partly influenced by non-European philosophies and belief systems, such as Thai Buddhism and Animism. In Memoria, this is further accentuated by intermedial connections with Latin American magical realism and Chinese classical literature, both of which are also influenced by non-European philosophies and belief systems, including Amerindian Perspectivism and Daoism.

The languages we speak and the empires we embrace: addressing decolonization through the gaze of the empire

Abstract In this article I make a case for differentiating the process of decolonization in education from the process of dismantling the values of the empire and their continuing, subliminal role in our thought and practice (the gaze of the empire). I argue that ignoring the empire within (particularly the word ‘empire’ itself) is what sustains the colonial gaze and what constitutes decolonization’s greatest obstacle. I employ a poststructuralist, Foucauldian framework, which helps me explore notions of power and knowledge through language and the gaze. To illuminate discussions, I make use of some of the historical context necessary to understand the spirit and the tragedy of empire, with its language as principal instrument, as well as some of the literary aspects (Magical Realism and poetry) that have been used to gaze at the colonized and redeem the conqueror.

CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES IN THE YOUNG ADULT NOVEL WE ARE NOT FROM HERE, BY JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ

This article analyses We Are Not from Here (2020), a young adult novel by Jenny Torres Sanchez. The book follows the journey of three adolescents from Guatemala to the United States on top of La Bestia, the train that goes across Mexico. This article analyses the different narrative techniques thatTorres Sanchez utilises to cover the themes and topics that structure the novel. The novel focuses onthe network of altruistic solidarity that has bloomed all over Mexico to assist migrants while illustratingthe brutality of an exhausting journey towards the north, a fact connected to the theoretical frameworkused to approach the text. Accordingly, diaspora theory (Bromley, Ashcroft et al., Brah, Fuentes Kraffczyk) will play a fundamental role in the following analysis exploring the way in which trauma, vulnerability and affect (Pollock, Tal, Butler, Ganteau, Thrailkill) complement each other in the text; and how the Latin American Gothic (Casanova-Vizcaíno and Ordiz) juxtaposes magical realism (Di Iorio Sandín and Perez, Murwood) in certain episodes.

“Fantasy as Subversion”: Ray, Totalitarianism, and “Dissensus”

Abstract Satyajit Ray’s faith in the integrity of his middle-class protagonists and his philosophical detachment coupled with his aesthetics of contemplation have often been brutally criticized by his Marxist critics. They have accused Ray of being a bourgeois humanist, a political effete without any specific ideology, estranged from tackling pressing contemporary social and political issues. The article attempts to trace Ray’s thoughts on cinema and analyze how his films, even those that seem to be fantasies, are not situated in a rarefied atmosphere but are determined by a number of sociopolitical events that intersect and interact in myriad ways. A ghost story by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, provided the filmmaker with the perfect narrative trope to critique what he considered the germs of contemporary social and political conditions, the vantage point from which his allegory could address not only the contemporary scenario but also the distant future. In his fantasy-based musicals Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969) and Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980), Ray decided to be at his subversive best. These films based on magic realism were not simply departures from his neo-realistic narratives but also veiled satires that indicted the establishment.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.

Más allá del invierno : A Feminist Crime Novel

Since the publication of La casa de los espíritus in 1982, Isabel Allende has become a prolific writer of novels, a memoir, a collection of short stories, and novels for children and young adults. In her first novels, romance is mixed with the historical genre and elements of magical realism. Más allá del invierno (2017) is one of her most recent novels and one that so far has not been widely studied. For Kerri Muñoz it blends the testimonial genre with romanticism to criticize neoliberalism. For their part, Hoda Shabrang and Golnaz Karimi use Homi Bhabha’s concepts to propose that the three main characters have fluid identities. While I agree with both analyses, in this essay I explore the female characters of the novel, their parallelisms and interactions, and propose that even though Allende resorts to her well-known romanticism and depiction of Latin American historical events, Más allá del invierno also incorporates elements of the female crime thriller as it touches on topics of biopolitics, violence and care work in the United States.

The Overlap of Žižek’s Trauma Theory and Magic Realism in the Novel The Dead Dolphin by Hassan Bahrami

The Overlap of Žižek’s Trauma Theory and Magic Realism in the Novel The Dead Dolphin by Hassan Bahrami

Cinema Novo vs. Beatlemania: Discovering the use of sound and music in two unfilmed and unpublished Brazilian screenplays from the mid-1960s

In this article, I analyse sound and music in two unfilmed screenplays written by filmmakers Sergio Person and Jean-Claude Bernardet: SSS against Jovem Guarda (1966) and The Plague of the Ruminants (1967). Why would two leading figures of the politically engaged Cinema Novo jump into a commercial project with the ‘alienating’ leader of the Americanized Jovem Guarda? Their next project, The Plague of the Ruminants, contested the dictatorship. Inspired by magical realism, it would use Hollywoodesque fantastic spectacle. Through interesting interventions on the soundtrack, Person and Bernardet subtly denounced Jovem Guarda’s support for the military regime. This ironically contrasts with the soundtrack to SSS against Jovem Guarda. The article contributes to studies of sound and music in screenplays. I analyse different aspects pertaining to sound and music, compare these screenplays to other completed film projects by Person and Bernardet and place them in the context of Brazilian culture and politics.

Being (in)formed by indigenous voices: First steps to using graphic narratives to decolonise speculative fiction

The Greenlandic visual artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have produced a series of four graphic narratives to represent distinct moments in Greenland's history, spanning the pre-colonised and colonial period. These narratives employ aspects of magic realism and adopt an approach to narrative that focuses on the supernatural and presents modes of being that contrast with their audiences' understanding of realities that are ordinarily (only) visible. I argue that these graphic narratives use strategies from speculative fiction that frame the modern European presence in Greenland and the narrative of colonialism as one of several multiple realities in the Arctic, rather than its central axis, leaving open the possibility for indigenous Greenlanders to speak on their own terms. This enables these graphic narratives to illuminate aspects of knowledge (including features of oral legend and supernatural encounters) that were previously discredited in colonial discourse. Furthermore, I show that attending to how embodied aspects of Greenlandic Inuit storytelling traditions can be captured in the graphic narrative medium may be an effective decolonial strategy, which could be employed by speculative fiction. I thus advocate methodologies for speculative fiction that strategically broaden its boundaries in order to address its intractable colonial legacy. Informed by approaches that focus attention on form - such as Marks's haptic visuality (2000) and visual theories of the power of hand-drawn comics (Groensteen 2010, Chute 2008) to engage the reader/viewer in both an embodied and reflective way - I assert that including graphic narratives which employ strategies of speculative fiction may present a unique opportunity for the genre to mount a powerful challenge to a colonial knowledge production.

Роман Маркеса «Сто лет одиночества»: опыт дискурсивного анализа

The object of the study is the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is considered one of the most complex works in world literature due to the many repetitive anthroponyms and bizarre expressive means due to the poetics of magical realism. A rationalized literary analysis is carried out, aimed at identifying and explaining the philosophical, anthropocentric message of the text, ‘cleared’ from mythopoetic layers. The main discursive, problem-thematic lines that predetermine the systemic crisis of society and the ‘end of the world’ are identified. These are ‘forgetfulness of native languages’, ‘military conflicts’, ‘desacralization of God’, ‘profanation of traditional values’, ‘environmental conflicts’, ‘dominance of urgy over gonia’, ‘incest’. The image ‘rainstorm’ and the anthroponym ‘Buendia’ are interpreted, symbolizing the probability of a ‘point of return’ and the historical optimism of the author. The conclusion is made about the high educational potential of the ‘novel-warning’.

Spectre and Speculation: Haunting and Uncanniness in Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree by Niq Mhlongo

Niq Mhlongo's collection of short stories, Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), does not perhaps immediately present itself as speculative fiction. The collection, however, gives the supernatural world of African indigenous knowledge as much weight in shaping characters' lives and experiences as it does contemporary socio-political realities. It troubles established genre distinctions in that it can be seen as a work simultaneously belonging to magical realism, social realism, and horror. This article contends that it is precisely owing to the work's use of supernatural and uncanny aspects that this collection can be viewed as a form of social or sociological realism, which aims at depicting the peculiar contemporary and subjective (sur)realities of many young black South Africans. It is faithful to the contradictory worlds of tradition and globalisation that many South Africans straddle, as well as to the spectres of colonialism and Apartheid, that impinge on the present in both material and immaterial forms. In many ways the collection stages the difficulty of decolonisation and the subjective spectres and doppeigängers that such a process unleashes. This paper will make use of the work of Sigmund Freud, Avery F. Gordon, Eve Tuck and C. Ree to explore instances of haunting and the uncanny in Mhlongo's collection.

Enchantment as a Subversive force in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child Toni Morrison. God Help the Child. Magical Realism. Enchantment. Colorism.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.