Magic realism as post-colonialist device in Midnights Children Essay

charming realness as home-colonialist device in Midnights ChildrenMagic realism in copulation to the post-colonial and Midnights Children The formal technique of misrepresentation realism, Linda Hutcheon writes, (with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled appear 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 the States and Third World countries is accompanied by a definition of a post-modern text as signifying a change 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 truncated definition of the term post-colonialismas I intend to use it in this essay will aid the clarification of the links made amidst 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 debatable if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps premature to declare the demise of colonialism. A country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally 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. capital of the United Kingdom Routledge, 1995.Durix, Jean-Pierre. Salman Rushdie hearing. Kunapipi4.2 (1982) 17 - 26.Hutcheon, Linda. Circling the Downspout of Empire. Ashcroft, Bill et al., 130 - 5.Loomba, Ania.Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 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 Virgin 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.