Magic Realism In Post Colonialism

The combination of the fabulous and the real culminates in the incursion of different cultural norms, “present[ing] the postcolonial context from both the colonized peoples’ and the colonizers’ perspectives through its narrative structure as well as its themes” (Slemon). Thus, magic realism is designated as a polyvocal and multicultural literary mode. Within the postcolonial awareness of the necessity to respond to the imperial discourse,/ its dual nature magic realism enables the dispossessed African American women writers to break their forced silence and to speak up, forming what Bhabha designates as “cultures of postcolonial contra-modernity” (). They take advantage of its polyvocality that offers them a revisionary representation of the

Mixing the fabulous with the real, they manage to create monstrous female characters whose supernatural abilities are seen as pertaining to the everyday reality. Its revisionary project reconstructs the traditional forms of grotesqueness recovers the lost voices of the female cultural and racial other whose otherness and monstrosities becomes celebrated rather than denigrated. Instead of participating in the upholding of the system of binarism which is based on a hierarchical basis, magic realism invests in

Actually, the combination of the fictional and the factual offers an “encounter of two [different] cultures, reflected in the language of narration. There is a juxtaposition of a rational view of reality, based on a Western cosmology, and a magical view coming from ancient non-Western systems of belief and folklore” (Chanady). In other words, while the ‘fantastical’ elements in magic realism are used by dispossessed groups like women, ex-colonized subjects and ethnic minorities, the rational-scientific visions are attributed to the dominant centre. The opposition between these two discourses within the bounds of magic realism features the Bakhtinian “carnivalized narrative” which is based on struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces, disclosing what is left in said the former. Magic realism thus, turns out to be a carnivalesque discourse that upholds the jovial ‘carnivalesque spirit’ in which not only “language is used extravagantly,” but also myths, legends, supernatural elements, folktales of a specific cultural society, (Faris and Zamora 184). The exuberance of different magical elements offers thus an incredible novelty while revising the truth-claims of western realism. Examining the spirit of the carnival based on, zestful exaggerations and profusion of different elements, Danow explains that magic realism upholds the carnival’s principles of excess, exaggeration,