Phenomenal women: Magical activism in postmodern feminist fiction

In this dissertation I establish and explore the links between the current critical parameters of magical realism, exemplified in Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, and several women writers from the Americas who adapt key characteristics of the mode in order to assert feminist ideals of coalition practices and community-building. I argue that women writing from African American, Chicana, Native American and Afro-Caribbean cultural contexts employ the mode to imagine possibilities for healing, empowerment, and community building which are difficult to fit within the parameters of strictly realistic narrative. Writers including Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko and Ana Castillo experiment with feminist adaptations of magical realism as a form of political activism which places gender and class issues at its center, resulting in a new mode I term magical activism.Magical activist texts are characterized by their use of some elements of magical realism as a platform from which to generate new ideas for community-building as a weapon against the kinds of problems their characters experience. I consider why the radical form of the postmodern novel and the incorporation of magic, fantasy, and the supernatural are especially conducive to the feminist ideal of personal growth through coalition practices. Thus this study investigates how and why certain women have forged a link between magic and activism in order to empower women's participation in a cross-cultural debate on the relationship between local societies and the political processes which exploit or exclude them.This project reveals women reshaping magical realist fiction into an activist mode from which they can participate in contemporary conversations about modernization, technology, and the loss of community. Each of these writers uses magical realism in various ways to process or overcome personal and cultural anxieties about these trends. Magic becomes allegory for the work required to recognize the arbitrary nature of boundaries and thereby deconstruct them, to shift the shape of current political realities, to invest in the transhistorical global web of being, and to transform individual actions in ways that reveal that interconnectedness.