Magical realism, teleportation and decoloniality in Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison
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Abstract
Magical Realism, the literary gender to which these novels belong, has been a genre that is traditionally seen as a Western endeavor, reinforcing colonial ideas since its appearance. Since this branch of Realism is commonly understood as subversive and decolonial (Bernardino-Costa & Grosfoguel, 2016; Frazier, 2018), I seek to explain through this comparative study, the relationship between this fictional genre and the feminist decolonial movements that existed in the manners of colonization of the United States. Both works act by means of the speculative trope of “teleportation” (Oxford,2020; Piberam,2021; Michaelis, 2024), common theme to Kindred and Beloved, as a method of subversion of the Western Cosmo view, by questioning the conjectures of History and Science (Agatti, 1977). The purpose of this article is to verify the role that teleportation excerpts play in each of the two novels, examining excerpts of time travel and other supernatural phenomena that result in decolonial criticism. I conclude that such magic phenomena, commonly found in the writings of Black women (Ahmad & Kaneez, 2017; Sousa & Dias, 2018), occur in these works as efficient tools that, in a subliminal way, enact to fight the colonial intersectionality and its ailment.
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