ABSTRACT
To suggest that magic(al) realist writing can be found only in particular ‘locations’ would be misleading. It is after all a narrative mode, or a way of thinking in its most expansive form, and those concepts cannot be ‘kept’ in a geographic location. However, it is true to say that certain locations and countries have become associated with producing magic realist, and later magical realist writing. It has been noted that magical realist fictions are often set in rural areas away from influence over, or influence from, the political power centres. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez sets the majority of his novels in a fictional town called Macondo on the isolated Caribbean coast of Colombia. The African American novelist Toni Morrison, whilst sometimes setting her novels in the city, sets the magical realist events in rural areas and small townships. However, this is not the case for all magical realist texts, as some highly politically motivated writers have set their magical realist fictions in large cities that are the focus of political and social tensions. The British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, whose fictions are set in some of the world’s largest urban areas such as London, Bombay or New York, is the most notable of these writers. However, each of these novels is portrayed from the marginal perspectives of people lacking political power, whether they are an impotent writer in a pickle factory in Bombay, or a group of young British Asian revolutionaries in London. For these reasons magical realism has become associated with fictions that tell the tales of those on the margins of political power and influential society. This has meant that much magical realism has originated in many of the postcolonial countries that are battling against the influence of their previous colonial rulers, and consider themselves to be at the margins of imperial power. It has also become a common narrative mode for fictions written from the perspective of the politically or culturally disempowered, for instance indigenous people living under a covert colonial system such as Native Americans in the
United States, women writing from a feminist perspective, or those whose lives incorporate different cultural beliefs and practices from those dominant in their country of residence, such as Muslims in Britain.
