Postethnic Narrative Criticism

<p>Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy late-capitalist globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta Ana Castillo Julie Dash Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial multiethnic world.</p> <p>This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's <i>So Far from God</i> Oscar Zeta Acosta's <i>Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo</i> Salman Rushdie's <i>Midnight's Children Shame The Satanic Verses</i> and <i>The Moor's Last Sigh</i> Julie Dash's <i>Daughters of the Dust</i> and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's <i>Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.</i> Coining the term magicorealism to characterize these works Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel film and autobiography but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world where truth and falsity apply with narrative modes governed by other criteria.</p>