Cross-cultural women's writing and the politics of magic realism : Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko

This thesis explores the political possibilities and implications of magic realist discourse in contemporary cross-cultural women's writing. Focussing on the ontological writing of Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko, the comparative critical approach acknowledges the specificity of their writing to their cultural contexts whilst combining elements from post-colonial, feminist and post-structuralist criticism.

The study demonstrates that in writing the magic realist mode, which breaks down restrictive definitions of reality and truth, has a transformative effect upon readers. By emphasising the ritual and participatory aspects of story-telling, their texts encourage readers to react to the possibility of re-conceiving their world through stories, thereby precipitating political change.

The Introduction provides a brief over-view of the concept of magic realism. The first chapter analyses Toni Morrison's creation of a specifically African American form of magic realism which promotes the expression of an alternative history of slavery, and provides a vehicle for the articulation of African American cultural memory and its ambivalences. Chapter Two examines Maxine Hong Kingston's paradoxical relationship to magic realist narrative. It analyses her resistance to her mother's magic realism which she eventually adopts for the purpose of articulating a cultural memory which will be useful to the current circumstances of Chinese Americans. The third chapter explores Leslie Marmon Silko's use of the magic realist mode to create a text which illustrates the discursive tension between dominant American and Native American cultures. By doing so, she creates a text which merges postmodernist and Native American story-telling techniques to create a text with multiple perspectives and influenced by spirituality. The conclusion identifies similarities between the writers. It reveals that they have created a new form of writing which encourages readers to realise the political potential inherent in their texts in order to re-imagine their world and to counter the individualism, materialism and ultra-rationalism of dominant culture.