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The Arabian Nights and the Contemporary Arabic Novel *

Maher Jarrar

in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West

The Arabian Nights in contemporary Arabic fiction circulates to Asia, Africa, and Latin America only to return again to its Eastern roots. The chapter provides a taxonomy of these ... More

The Arabian Nights in contemporary Arabic fiction circulates to Asia, Africa, and Latin America only to return again to its Eastern roots. The chapter provides a taxonomy of these adaptations, including the interplay of story cycles and motifs, the invention of “new” nights, and the reworking of narrative techniques in specific novels written in Arabic. The influence of magical realism, especially in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, on the Arabic novel has been pronounced, principally by way of the Nights' reception in Latin America. Transformed by the often transgressive political nature of magical realism, some Arabic novelists have found in the Nights a pre-text for a counter-narrative that protests against colonialism. The novels reveal the text's circular return to the Arab world after centuries of translation into European languages, Crossfertilized with folklore, the Arabian Nights are ironically given the shape—albeit thoroughly re-imagined—of the European novel.Less

“The Pleas of the Desperate”: Magical Realism, Latinidad, and (or) Collective Agency in Ana Castillo's So Far From God

Marta Caminero-Santangelo

in On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity

This chapter discusses an argument in Ana Castillo's novel, So Far from God, in which she challenges the ubiquitous critical ascription of magical realism to texts by Latinos/Latinas. It also looks ... More

This chapter discusses an argument in Ana Castillo's novel, So Far from God, in which she challenges the ubiquitous critical ascription of magical realism to texts by Latinos/Latinas. It also looks at the presumed connection that this implies between Chicano/Chicana writers and the Latin American Boom. The text discussed is centrally concerned with the theme of collective agency, and magical realism actually figures as a threat to empowered collectivity, rather than being a signifier of it.Less

Marvelous Autocrats: Disrupted Realisms in the Dictator Novel of the South Atlantic

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

in The Global South Atlantic

This essay shows how the idea of the South Atlantic as a space of dictatorships and banana republics was contested on the ground by literary experimentation and transoceanic influence. Armillas- ... More

This essay shows how the idea of the South Atlantic as a space of dictatorships and banana republics was contested on the ground by literary experimentation and transoceanic influence. Armillas- Tiseyra uses Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie (Life and a Half 1979) as an example of a dictator novel, a genre that spans the Global South. Armillas-Tiseyra argues for the term “constellation” to be used in place of “magical realism” to classify the genre. “Constellation” here serves as a figure both for the relationship of individual texts or textual features to each other (a loose configuration or grouping) and for a mode of comparison that proceeds by juxtaposition and collage rather than more rigid hierarchical systematization. The allows Armillas-Tiseyra to approach and grapple with the difficult relationship between critique and narrative form.Less

‘The dense, murky water of the past’: Swamps, Nostalgia and Settlement Myth in Meir Shalev’s The Blue Mountain

Hannah Boast

in Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after ... More

This chapter examines the changing meanings of swamp drainage in Israel’s national mythology. Swamp drainage was undertaken in the early twentieth century by the Jewish National Fund and again after the establishment of the State of Israel. Once seen as a triumph of Zionist ingenuity, draining swamps was redefined in the late twentieth century as an emblem of Zionism’s environmental hubris. This chapter assesses this history through Meir Shalev’s magical realist novel The Blue Mountain (1988), situating Shalev’s text in its contemporary contexts of environmentalism and post-Zionism.Less

Thinking Magic, Reinventing the Real: Consciousness and Decolonization in Tropic of Orange

in Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels

This chapter examines the issues of consciousness and decolonization in Karen Tei Yamahista's novel Tropic of Orange. It suggests that the novel's transnational agenda can be more fruitfully ... More

This chapter examines the issues of consciousness and decolonization in Karen Tei Yamahista's novel Tropic of Orange. It suggests that the novel's transnational agenda can be more fruitfully investigated as a project of decolonization in social, spatial, and psychological senses, and discusses the importance and the difficulty of acquiring historical consciousness as a precondition for disrupting the territorial assumptions and logics of colonialism. The chapter also considers Yamahista's use of magical realism as a historical form and her articulation of historicist commitments through apocalyptic imaginations.Less

Adventures in the Global Amazon

Ursula K. Heise

in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

This chapter, building on Ch. 1, explores how a sense of globally connected places develops from innovative aesthetic techniques in two works that focus on the Amazon rainforest as an icon of ... More

This chapter, building on Ch. 1, explores how a sense of globally connected places develops from innovative aesthetic techniques in two works that focus on the Amazon rainforest as an icon of environmentalist concern. German installation artist Lothar Baumgarten’s experimental nature documentary The Origin of the Night: Amazon Cosmos presents images and sounds that ostensibly portray the Brazilian jungle, but are revealed as images of the river Rhine in Germany at the end of the film. The superimposition of the two landscapes generates a complex reflection on global interconnectedness. Japanese American novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest revolves around a mysterious substance discovered in the Brazilian jungle that becomes the point of departure for global business and media ventures and is ultimately revealed to be geologically transformed First-World trash. Yamashita’s thematic focus on a local place transformed by the global, as well as her combination of Latin American techniques derived from the work of Mário de Andrade and Gabriel García Márquez with North American postmodernist strategies, create a narrative world that links the local, national, and global realms in innovative ways. Both works aim to create an “eco-cosmopolitan” awareness of global cultural and ecological spaces.Less

Bae Chunhui

Joshua D Pilzer

in Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese "Comfort Women"

The author investigates the life and songs of Bae Chunhui, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system living at the House of Sharing. Bae Chunhui gathered a quadralingual repertoire of songs to herself ... More

The author investigates the life and songs of Bae Chunhui, a survivor of the “comfort woman” system living at the House of Sharing. Bae Chunhui gathered a quadralingual repertoire of songs to herself throughout the course of her life, especially during and after her postwar career as a professional singer in Japan. In so doing, she not only sustained herself economically; she created an identity capable of withstanding the hardships and the turmoil of her wartime and post-war life, and she culled the best of her experiences and assembled them into a redeemed world. She brought this self and an inexhaustible catalog of songs to Korea when she returned in 1981, and she sustains that identity and that repertoire at the House of Sharing to this day.Less

Magical Realism and the Fantastic

Eitan P. Fishbane

in The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar

In this chapter we encounter the zoharic representation of reality as an enchanted realm, one in which miracles erupt in the ordinary stream of human events, where ordinary experience opens into an ... More

In this chapter we encounter the zoharic representation of reality as an enchanted realm, one in which miracles erupt in the ordinary stream of human events, where ordinary experience opens into an alternate reality of the fantastic. In many zoharic cases, I have argued, these narrative scenes may be characterized as instances of magical realism, a depiction of terrestrial life that inserts an otherworldly dimension blended smoothly with the representation of ordinary reality. Here we observe structures and themes such as: sensory ambiguity and temporal confusion; entrance into a fantastical and otherwordly domain through portals in the mundane realm; representation of a dynamic heavenly mythology that involves shape-shifting celestial beings.Less

National Project and Disappearing Space

Hongyan Zou

in Western China on Screen: An Urban Exploration

This chapter displays how material and cognitive spaces are shaped and demolished due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam by examining Zhang Ming’s 1996 Rainclouds over Wushan [Wushan yunyu] ... More

This chapter displays how material and cognitive spaces are shaped and demolished due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam by examining Zhang Ming’s 1996 Rainclouds over Wushan [Wushan yunyu] and Jia Zhangke’s 2006 Still Life [Sanxia haoren]. The enormous national project represents the macro spatial view of rationalising and modernising the urban space, yet Zhang Ming chooses a micro perspective to examine the inertia and subjective dimension of the city. He creates a Thirdspace by showing the street view of the urban space and everyday life related to emerging commercialism and oppressed desire in a claustrophobic space, which opposes the grand discourse of building the Three Gorges Dam to national resurrection and modernisation. Still Life adopts the style of magical realism to convey the dramatic changes underway in the physical space and the consequent traumatic experiences in the mental space of characters. It works as a space of resistance by focusing on those marginalised people who make ruins, live in ruins, are exiled and even buried by ruins. Ruins, therefore, bear clear and indivisible class marks. The cinematic representations of the city resonate with the immensity and complexity of the trend toward urbanisation and modernisation.Less

Taking The Wide Net to the Waters of La Frontera along Eudora Welty’s Natchez Trace

Dolores Flores-Silva

in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches

This chapter addresses Latin American contexts for reading and teaching Welty's fiction. Beginning with traces of Spanish Natchez and territories of New Spain in Welty, this chapter moves to engage ... More

This chapter addresses Latin American contexts for reading and teaching Welty's fiction. Beginning with traces of Spanish Natchez and territories of New Spain in Welty, this chapter moves to engage aspects of magical realism, carnival ethos, and consciousness ofla frontera (the border) in Welty's early work. Readers may come to see that Welty can be read well in alignment with several different Latina or Chicana writers.Less

Tricks of the Light

Lloyd Whitesell

in Wonderful Design: Glamour in the Hollywood Musical

This chapter turns to the other side of the coin—the failure of magical belief. Glamour conjures up a transfigured counter-reality and acts as a bridge to that imagined existence. But the entire ... More

This chapter turns to the other side of the coin—the failure of magical belief. Glamour conjures up a transfigured counter-reality and acts as a bridge to that imagined existence. But the entire symbolic edifice is built on fancy and prone to collapse, with reality reasserting itself and dragging us back from our projection into the dreamworld. Many film musicals warn against glamour as mystification or deceit. Four types of examples are discussed, each skeptical in a different way (joking, haunted, wishful, manipulative). Concluding discussion shows how the musical genre has affinities with the hybrid aesthetic of “magical realism.” The incorporation of a realistic dimension into the discourse of musical fantasy preserves an external vantage point for critical reflection—a demystifying impulse in tension with glamour’s mystique.Less

India and Indians in SF by Indians and Others

Uppinder Mehan

in Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction

Uppinder Mehan, in “India and Indians in SF by Indians and Others,” examines the representation of India in recent science fiction in the works of contemporary writers outside India, such as Ian ... More

Uppinder Mehan, in “India and Indians in SF by Indians and Others,” examines the representation of India in recent science fiction in the works of contemporary writers outside India, such as Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004) and Cyberabad Days (2009). Mehan makes comparisons to the SF of Indian writers such as Anuradha Marwah’s Idol Love (1999), Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (2008), and Rimi Chatterjee’s Signal Red (2005) and how they effortlessly explore concerns in their science fiction that are beyond the received images of India and Indians and surface knowledge available to the casual observer. Mehan interrogates the distorted and truthful reflections of Indian culture in science fiction.Less

The Cinema of Piracy, the Sea and Spectral Voyages: Ruiz’s Neo-Baroque Cinema of the 1980s

Michael Goddard

in The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies

This chapter deals with Raúl Ruiz's films from the 1980s,which one of his most expansive periods. During this period, Ruiz returned insistently to producing feature films, developing a distinctive ... More

This chapter deals with Raúl Ruiz's films from the 1980s,which one of his most expansive periods. During this period, Ruiz returned insistently to producing feature films, developing a distinctive style drawing on magical realism, surrealism, and the baroque, and dealing with a cluster of themes around the sea, piracy, and childhood. Ruiz's practice took on an incredible diversity in this period, and was expanded both in terms of geography, especially with the production of several films in Portugal, and also in terms of expressive heterogeneity of cinematic images. As Ruiz stated, Portugal functions in his cinema precisely as a bridge to Chile. The series of films that Ruiz filmed in Portugal include The Territory (1981), The Roof of the Whale (1981), and City of Pirates (1983).Less

Cairo: Urban Space, Surveillance and the State

Yasmine Ramadan

in Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction

This chapter focuses on the representation of the urban space of Cairo. It examines Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka-l-raʾiha (TheSmell of it, 1966), Gamal al-Ghitani’s Waqaʾiʿ harat al-Zaʿfarani (The ... More

This chapter focuses on the representation of the urban space of Cairo. It examines Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka-l-raʾiha (TheSmell of it, 1966), Gamal al-Ghitani’s Waqaʾiʿ harat al-Zaʿfarani (The Zafarani Files, 1976), Ibrahim Aslan’s Malik al-hazin (The Heron, 1981), and Radwa Ashour’s, Faraj (BlueLorries, 2008) reading the novels in opposition to the realist narratives of earlier decades. The shift away from the realist depictions of the urban metropolis as the site of national struggle, or of the alley as the cross-section of Egyptian society, is accompanied by a new representational aesthetics. Through the presentation of the city as the space of incarceration, the reimagination of the alley as a fantastic space, and the turn towards the previously ignored neighborhood of Imbaba, these writers showcase new literary techniques; aspects of magical realism; elements of the fantastic; a turn to hyper-realism, in order to represent the transformation of the urban space of Cairo into one of surveillance and control.Less

Myth and the Fantastic in the Work of Junot Díaz

Justine McConnell

in Classicisms in the Black Atlantic

This chapter explores the ways in which Junot Díaz draws on ancient Greek myth in two of his works, Drown (1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Placing Greek myth alongside the ... More

This chapter explores the ways in which Junot Díaz draws on ancient Greek myth in two of his works, Drown (1996) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Placing Greek myth alongside the stories from other fantastical worlds, such as those found in the works of Tolkien and Marvel Comics, Díaz offers a pathway to realms seemingly not affected by transatlantic slavery, racism, or modern dictatorship and diaspora. Yet, as much work on magical realism has shown, a turn to the fantastic can be deeply political. Díaz’s evocation of Greek myth (most prominently, those of Homer’s Odyssey and the House of Atreus) is given only as much space as the myths of other times and places, thereby stripping the classical canon of the aura of superiority which it gained during the colonial period. In doing so, Díaz works to creates a new epic for the Dominican diaspora.Less

Prose

Carol Bonomo Albright and Joanna Clapps Herman

in Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana

This is a 1992 fiction by Salvatore La Puma that sometimes uses magical realism.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Immersion in ‘The Riverman’

Melissa Zeiger

in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Riverman’, a poem generally overlooked or dismissed by her critics, as one in which travel, both literal and figurative—in particular Bishop’s Brazilian ... More

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Riverman’, a poem generally overlooked or dismissed by her critics, as one in which travel, both literal and figurative—in particular Bishop’s Brazilian relocation—prompts her to articulate a new poetics that distinguishes her at once from her former poetic personae and allows her to stake out her own position relative to powerful predecessors and interlocutors. Travel for Bishop means emergence from a set of enclosures, first of the childhood family, later of literary precedent. Through a shamanic figure, the riverman of the title, Bishop is radically reimagining herself and her poetry as ‘other’, in an aesthetic of magical realism, wondering what strange poetic worlds and reincarnations are habitable. The poem recalls Bishop’s location in a dismembered family, but also conceives of a poetics not determined by and located in family but instead a poetics of exoticism, otherness, displacement.Less

Introduction

Helen Moore

in Amadis in English: A Study in the Reading of Romance

Beginning with the phenomenon of the postcolonial Amadis as manifested in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Muldoon, and Walt Whitman, this chapter analyses the cultural and historical ... More

Beginning with the phenomenon of the postcolonial Amadis as manifested in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Muldoon, and Walt Whitman, this chapter analyses the cultural and historical flexibilities of Amadis that have recommended it to readers and writers in diverse periods, languages, and cultures. An overview of the genre of the Spanish books of chivalry (libros de caballerías) to which Amadis belongs, an account of its defining relationship with Don Quixote, and a survey of the French translations by Nicolas de Herberay that first mediated the romance to England, set the scene for the succeeding chapters.Less