Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism ― Strategized Belonging

For years, critics have been asking if (and proclaiming that) magical realism is dead. Has this narrative mode, arguably the most important literary movement of the twentieth century, seen its day and become, now, an exhausted and dated form? Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism emphatically contends that magical realism still has much to offer contemporary readers, critics, and authors. However, it has been unnecessarily limited by hermeneutical approaches that have restricted the form to particular, if significant, historical moments and concerns. Instead, this book argues, magical realism might be re-viewed for its potential to enact a range of potential functionalities. The particular function on which Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism focuses is magical realism's capacity to construct sociological representations of belonging, a usage she traces closely in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century novels of Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Cristina Garcia, and Helen Oyeyemi.

In demonstrating magical realism's capacity to strategize belonging, this book works not only to open up understandings of the mode to new possibilities, but also asks readers to consider ways these narratives are employing magical realism to engage contemporary, relevant concerns. Specifically, Sasser maps the preoccupation with belonging onto contemporary cosmopolitanism, that revived interdisciplinary discourse within which belonging is also a central concern, among other questions related to world citizenship. Magical realism, by enfleshing this pressing, renewed concern with belonging within narrative skin, thus demonstrates its continued purchase as a storytelling mode, one for whom the death knell need not yet be rung.

Kim Anderson Sasser is Assistant Professor of English at Wheaton College where she has taught courses including Modern Global Literature, Magical Realism, and West African Literature. Her areas of interest include twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone fiction, magical realism, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial literature and theory.