Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie

Preface

Preface This studyof contemporary U.S. multiethnic and British writers and movie directors who employ magicorealism to tell stories is more than a study of how language, style, and form—in novels, autobiographies, and film— work to represent the unrepresentable. It is a celebration of the coming of age of certain writers and directors who revitalized and reformed a storytelling mode by playfully inventing worlds populated with racially mixed up and culturally hybrid characters that spoke deeply to the experiences and identities of people like myself. However, coming into contact with contemporary magicorealist works by Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie, to name only those I study in the following pages, did not constitute just a reflection on and an af- firmation of my personal ‘‘impure’’ identity, but more deeply, it was an enduring acquaintance with a variety of postdiasporic identities and experiences . In the early s when such postdiasporic writers and directors juxtaposed the ‘‘real’’ with the ‘‘unreal’’ to imagine the identities formed out of a living-here-belonging-elsewhere phenomenon, I was sent away from my home in California’s north-central valley to live with my Anglo madrina in London. The story of my dislocation is complicated, involving most of those ‘‘isms’’ (racism, sexism, and so on) that control and/or erase the ethnoracial subject. My mother, having lost her job and gone on Social Security, felt she had no choice but to reduce her household. I arrived in an inner-city London filled to the brim with Marmite-eating xenophobes. Journeying far from my Mexican/Guatemalan-American family, I carried with me a suitcase of narratives of U.S. ethnosocial dynamics. Already at our California elementary school, my older, lighter-skinned brother (whose blond locks had made him especially popular among our castaTseng 2002.12.24 08:40 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet 9 of 157 invested relatives in Los Angeles and Mexico City) had been regularly the target of racial epithets because his English didn’t fit; being darker, I didn’t look ‘‘right,’’ and, anyway, my lunch box was full of food other thanWonder Bread and Oscar Mayer. Life turned even more confusing in London. I identified strongly with my Mexicano roots but found no one on the school grounds or off who shared a sense of my culture, language, and worldview. Most Brits derived their sense of Mexican culture from Hollywood’s stereotyping narratives where Mexicans appear as poncho- and sombrero-wearing objectspecimens slouching in the shadows cast by white figures. I was identified as ‘‘different,’’ phenotypically aligned with the British-black Other. On my way home on the underground, kids sporting National Front emblems would regularly notify me of my ‘‘impure,’’ noncitizen status by roughing me up. Six thousand miles away from home, nothing much had changed other than the shift in ethnosocial identifying nomenclature : ‘‘spic’’/‘‘greaser’’ to ‘‘darky’’/‘‘paki.’’ My body, language, and worldview were forced to occupy an ethnoracial space coded as degenerate, impure —nonwhite British. Incidentally, myextended sojourn in London’s innercitycoincided with Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror. I arrived just when British troops were being deployed for the Falklands/Malvinas and when Mrs. Thatcher announced the ‘‘tidying’’ up of the inner city and, more generally, the beginning of an era of political, economic, and cultural ‘‘permanent revolution’’ at home. She began to sweep up Britain’s ‘‘impure’’ Others—tightening immigration controls and instituting ‘‘incarcerate, don’t educate’’ public policy. Her goal was to revive an image of Britain as empire, infusing a rah-rah Britannia rhetoric into foreign and domestic policy. This led not just to union busting, but also to the massive privatization of traditionally public services such as railroads, hospitals, and schools. The working class and racialized urban Other were to cease being beneficiaries of such services. Also, as council flats were leveled and the urban poor displaced ,U.S.-styled megaplex stores and newly built Victorian–styled architectures mushroomed overnight. If my South Asian and Afro-Caribbean British friends and I wandered too deeply into and stayed too long in London’s moneyed West End, police would inform us of a city curfew, quickly ‘‘escort’’ us to the nearest underground station, and shuffle us onto trains leaving the city’s center. In the traditionally Other-zoned neighborhoods —Nottinghill Gate, Clapham, and Brixton—BMW sports cars appeared in front of newly refurbished houses belonging to a cadre of twenty-something white male...