MISFIT COMMODITIES: THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN MAGICAL REALISM AND NEOLIBERAL PRODUCTIVITY
Date
2020-05
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University of Delaware
Abstract
My thesis analyzes two magical realist novels, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, to explore how they rebel against cultural expectations set by global neoliberal capitalism.
Neoliberalism has impacted our world as David Harvey calls “a guide to all human action,” signifying that it is not only an economic force but a cultural one that seeks to replace old systems and institutions (Harvey 3). From this, neoliberalism enforces a set of expectations geared towards economic productivity, like colonialism years and centuries before. The neoliberal reality, while offering a more diverse set of players and beneficiaries often implements these expectations in ways to exploit human labor. Often, these expectations are to be compliant workers, to be model immigrants by making economic contributions to the new country, to be excessively controlling when in a position of power, and to maintain archaic gender roles.
Magical realism as an art form, seeks to have its characters let go of these expectations and proposes other ways for humans to live. Tropic of Orange and The God of Small Things have many characters who fail to be productive workers and, more importantly, stray from the model narratives expected of them as immigrants from Third World to First World countries. These novels also provide examples, and rebellion, of these expectations infiltrated into family life and gender relations, usually to do with maintaining patriarchy and sexual passivity in women.
Magical realism uses fantastic events to literalize the invisible pain of its characters and provides solutions for their plights. The larger work of this genre goes parallel with decolonization, what Walter Mingolo describes as an “undoing” of exploitative capitalist norms and “redoing” with more humane values (Mingolo 83).
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Keywords
english, magical realism, neoliberal productivity