Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet 1 of 157 Postethnic Narrative Criticism THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 3 of 157 Frederick Postethnic Luis Aldama Narrative Criticism 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet ‘‘’’ , , , , Austin Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 4 of 157 Copyright © by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet Printed in the United States of America First edition, Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box , Austin, TX -. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of / .- () (Permanence of Paper). -- Aldama, Frederick Luis, date Postethnic narrative criticism : magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie / Frederick Luis Aldama.—st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. --- (alk. paper) . American fiction—th century—History and criticism. Magic realism (Literature) . American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. English fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. English fiction—th century—History and criticism. Ethnic groups in literature. Minorities in literature. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. '.—dc Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 5 of 157 In the memory of friend and mentor Barbara Christian, 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet the burningly vital spirit of Mathew Adams, and my much loved madrina Linda Van Camp . all of whom died of cancer Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 7 of 157 Contents Preface ix 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet Acknowledgments xiii Rethreading the Magical Realist Debate Rebellious Aesthetic Acts Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé Ana Castillo’s (En)Gendered Magicorealism Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas Mapping the Postethnic Critical Method Notes Works Cited Index Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 9 of 157 Preface This study of contemporary U.S. multiethnic and British writers and movie 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet directors who employ magicorealism to tell stories is more than a study of how language, style, and form—in novels, autobiographies, and film— work to represent the unrepresentable. It is a celebration of the coming of age of certain writers and directors who revitalized and reformed a story- telling mode by playfully inventing worlds populated with racially mixed up and culturally hybrid characters that spoke deeply to the experiences and identities of people like myself. However, coming into contact with contemporary magicorealist works by Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie, to name only those I study in the following pages, did not constitute just a reflection on and an af- firmation of my personal ‘‘impure’’ identity, but more deeply, it was an enduring acquaintance with a variety of postdiasporic identities and ex- periences. In the early s when such postdiasporic writers and directors juxtaposed the ‘‘real’’ with the ‘‘unreal’’ to imagine the identities formed out of a living-here-belonging-elsewhere phenomenon, I was sent away from my home in California’s north-central valley to live with my Anglo madrina in London. The story of my dislocation is complicated, involving most of those ‘‘isms’’ (racism, sexism, and so on) that control and/or erase the ethnoracial subject. My mother, having lost her job and gone on Social Security, felt she had no choice but to reduce her household. I arrived in an inner-city London filled to the brim with Marmite-eating xenophobes. Journeying far from my Mexican/Guatemalan-American family, I car- ried with me a suitcase of narratives of U.S. ethnosocial dynamics. Already at our California elementary school, my older, lighter-skinned brother (whose blond locks had made him especially popular among our casta- Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 invested relatives in Los Angeles and Mexico City) had been regularly the target of racial epithets because his English didn’t fit; being darker, I didn’t look ‘‘right,’’ and, anyway,my lunch box was full of food other thanWonder Bread and Oscar Mayer. CRITICISM / sheet 10 of 157 Life turned even more confusing in London. I identified strongly with my Mexicano roots but found no one on the school grounds or off who shared a sense of my culture, language, and worldview. Most Brits de- rived their sense of Mexican culture from Hollywood’s stereotyping nar- ratives where Mexicans appear as poncho- and sombrero-wearing object- specimens slouching in the shadows cast by white figures. I was identified as ‘‘different,’’ phenotypically aligned with the British-black Other. On my way home on the underground, kids sporting National Front em- blems would regularly notify me of my ‘‘impure,’’ noncitizen status by roughing me up. Six thousand miles away from home, nothing much had changed other than the shift in ethnosocial identifying nomencla- ture: ‘‘spic’’/‘‘greaser’’ to ‘‘darky’’/‘‘paki.’’ My body, language, and world- 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE view were forced to occupy an ethnoracial space coded as degenerate, im- pure—nonwhite British. Incidentally, my extended sojourn in London’s inner city coincided with Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror. I arrived just when British troops were being deployed for the Falklands/Malvinas and when Mrs. Thatcher an- nounced the ‘‘tidying’’ up of the inner city and, more generally, the begin- ning of an era of political, economic, and cultural ‘‘permanent revolution’’ at home. She began to sweep up Britain’s ‘‘impure’’ Others—tightening immigration controls and instituting ‘‘incarcerate, don’t educate’’ public policy. Her goal was to revive an image of Britain as empire, infusing a rah-rah Britannia rhetoric into foreign and domestic policy. This led not just to union busting, but also to the massive privatization of tradition- ally public services such as railroads, hospitals, and schools. The work- ing class and racialized urban Other were to cease being beneficiaries of such services. Also, as council flats were leveled and the urban poor dis- placed,U.S.-styled megaplex stores and newly built Victorian–styled archi- tectures mushroomed overnight. If my South Asian and Afro-Caribbean British friends and I wandered too deeply into and stayed too long in London’s moneyed West End, police would inform us of a city curfew, quickly ‘‘escort’’ us to the nearest underground station, and shuffle us onto trains leaving the city’s center. In the traditionally Other-zoned neigh- borhoods—Nottinghill Gate, Clapham, and Brixton—BMW sports cars appeared in front of newly refurbished houses belonging to a cadre of twenty-something white male professionals. x Postethnic Narrative Criticism Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 London in the s was bursting at the seams with contradiction.There was the wave of powerful conservatism and the seemingly sudden over- flowing of novels and films that spoke of ‘‘being British, almost’’ as Kureishi would say. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Amitav Ghosh’s Circle of Reason, CRITICISM / sheet 11 of 157 Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, to name a few, provided alternative imaginative contact zones for audiences like my- self and my transdiasporic compadres to understand more about one another and to provide a sense of home. Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’Acosta, Ana Cas- tillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie is a study that seeks to more formally identify the means by which ethnic- and postcolonial- identified writers and directors represent the layered and oft-contradictory reality of the spectacularly topsy-turvy late-capitalist, globalizing world— all while creating magicorealist narratives peopled by a host of displaced, subaltern characters. 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE xi Preface Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Acknowledgments CRITICISM / sheet 13 of 157 This book grows out of deep discussions on, and a long-standing scholarly interest in, developing a conceptual framework for reading U.S. ethnic and 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE British postcolonial literatures, fictionalized autobiographies, and films. The sometimes heated and always layered conversations and debates that inform this book took place in a variety of venues. Over food and drink, author Hanif Kureishi’s words resonated loud and kept me going through publishing humps: ‘‘There’s all kinds of mixtures coming out. Like you. It’s your time. You know, you write your books and they’ll make a new category for you. I’m in the postcolonial category now, but I wasn’t in that category before. If you’re annoying a lot of people, you’re probably doing something right.’’ I would also like to acknowledge the many other conversations I have had with other writers (Lucha Corpi, Denise Chávez, Chitra Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Nava, Cecile Pineda, Ntozake Shange, Piri Thomas, Alfredo Véa, Jr., and Victor Villaseñor, to name a few) whose words confirmed what was at first only an intuitive feeling that later, after formal study, proved right: certain authors rework genre and language to articulate the unrepresentable, such as the trauma of dislocation and colonialism. Magicorealism is one such refiguration. Of course, schol- arly conversations that helped