Magic realism as post-colonialist device in Midnights Children Essay

Magic realism as hazard- compoundist device in Midnights ChildrenMagic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnights Children The formal technique of magic realism, Linda Hutcheon writes, (with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post-modernism and post-colonialism (131). Her tracing the origins of magic realism as a literary style to Latin America and Third World countries is accompanied by a definition of a post-modern text as signifying a budge from modernisms ahistorical burden of the past it is a text that self-consciously reconstructs its relationship to what came before (131). The post-modern is linked by magic realism to post-colonial literatures which are also negotiating....the same tyrannical weight of colonial history in conjunction with the past (131).Before discussing magic realism in Midnights Children, a brief definition of the term post-colonialismas I inte nd to persona it in this essay will aid the clarification of the links made between Hutcheons theory and the following analysis of Rushdies text. Ania Loomba argues that post-colonialism is a loose term. She notes that the prefix post....implies an aftermath in two senses - temporal, as in coming after, and ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have found contestable if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being officially independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependant) at the same time. (7)... ...Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London Routledge, 1995.Durix, Jean-Pierre. Salman Rushdie Interview. Kunapipi4.2 (1982) 17 - 26.Hutcheon, Linda. Circling the Downspout of Empire. Ashcroft, Bill et al., 130 - 5.Loomba, Ania.Colonialism/Pos tcolonialism. London Routledge, 1998.Mishra, Vijay. The Texts of Mother India. After Europe.Ed. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Sydney Dangaroo Press, 1989. 119-37.Monaco, James, ed. The complete(a) International Encyclopedia of Film. London Virgin, 1992.Pattayanak, Chandrabhanu. Interview with Salman Rushdie. Literary Criterion 18.3 (1983) 19 - 22.Rushdie, Salman. Midnights Children. London Vintage, 1995.Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London Vintage, 1994.Slemon, Stephen. Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse. Canadian Literature 116 (1988) 9 - 24.