Chapter 10 - Breaking Boundaries

Summary

Tracing its roots back to Romanticism and invoking a counter-realism associated with postmodernism, North American magical realism invites a variety of communities to resist inequity and oppressive rhetoric and culture and to revise historical, social and religious traditions. Its canon includes North American writers as diverse as Toni Morrison; Latina authors Cristina García, Ana Castillo and Julia Alvarez; feminist magical realists Laurie Foos and Aimee Bender; Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch; and indigenous authors Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and James Welch. A new wave of writers drawing upon magical realism – including Kelly Link, David Levithan, Micah Dean Hicks, Anna-Marie McLemore and Leslye Walton, and often using young adult literature – continues to redefine 'American-ness'. Magical realism carves out space for developing better understandings of established and new (or newly acknowledged) communities, allowing mainstream and disenfranchised authors alike – bound by geography, race, gender or other collective categorizations of identity – entry into the main discourse.