Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta, Anna Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie

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. multi ethnic and British post colonial 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 post colonial, multi ethnic world.This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multi ethnic and British post colonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's "So Far from God", Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta's "Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo", Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children", "Shame", "The Satanic Verses", and "The Moor's Last Sigh", Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust", and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid". Coining the term 'magicorealism' to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a post ethnic 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.