Magic Realism in a Transnational Context

Dear Colleagues,

The term “magic realism,” first introduced in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh in After Expressionism: Magical Realism, later became popular in South America. Latin American literary works, such as Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph and Other Stories (1945), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night (1970) focus on magical or supernatural phenomena that occur in the real world or a mundane setting. They also gave impacts upon North American “post-Faulknerian” writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Steve Erickson. However, this literary genre has not remained confined to the Americas, offering us a new perspective that illuminates ethnicity around the world.

As the ethnic movements reached its peak globally in the 1980s, some authors of Asian descent began adopting magic realism as a literary tool to express ethnicity. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994), and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menageries and Other Stories (2016) are good examples.

Among them, Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita moved from the U.S.A. to São Paulo, Brazil, where she produced a new narrative style of magic realism that reflects ethnicity beyond the historical discourse of victimization in the mainland U.S. Such transborder ethnic characteristics may be found in her novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest, in which a piece of flying debris remains attached to the forehead of the Japanese man Kazumasa Ishimaru through some kind of magnetic force, or her Tropic of Orange, in which a phantasmagoric Arcangel, a surrealistic Latin performer, transforms himself into anything he desires. Inspired by Márquez’s and Borges’s devices, Yamashita presents her magic realism within a transborder context as a fictional analog of anthropology and sociology that depicts the world as frequently humorous while inserting a critical investigation into people’s attempts to make sense of their world.

Magic realism as a genre now has transborder characteristics that lead us to reconsider our general concept of ethnicity within a nation. This Special Issue of Arts on Magic Realism welcomes ambitious and insightful papers containing new and provocative topics from a transnational perspective

Prof. Dr. Takayuki Tatsumi
Prof. Dr. Rie Makino
Guest Editors

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• magic realism
• transnational
• ethnicity
• Karen Tei Yamashita