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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Fantastic Cohabitations

  • from Part II - Development
  • Edited by Christopher Warnes, University of Cambridge, Kim Anderson Sasser, Wheaton College, Illinois
  • Book:
    Magical Realism and Literature
    Published online:
    22 October 2020
    Print publication:
    12 November 2020, pp 217-238

  • Summary

    Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and Hebrew-Mizrahi contexts, magical realism serves to puncture the purportedly rational language of the state with the fantastic as a vehicle of minoritarian empowerment. These texts narrate subaltern histories without constantly reproducing the hegemonic language of Othering and subjugation. They disrupt dominant national, ethnic, religious, racial and gender historiographies and ontologies in their respective contexts, but this disruption is all the more powerful when Arabic and Hebrew texts are placed in relation extradiegetically. The networks of relationality created by this dual reading allow us to see ‘Arabness’ with the proverbial third eye – from the positions of minority and majority simultaneously, thereby allowing for a complex, textured and multifaceted understanding of its identitarian and performative meanings.