College Honors Program

(Un)Spicing the American Melting Pot: The Commodification of Cultural Appetites, Seduction of Tropicalization, and Reclamation of the Latina Body in the Literature of Magical Feminism

Date of Creation

5-17-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Only

Department

English

First Advisor

Jorge Santos

Abstract

Magical realism is a Latin American genre of literature characterized by the portrayal of fantastical events in an otherwise realistic framework. Integral to the genre are themes of passion, mystery, and exoticism – all of which are frequently cast onto the Latina body in the Western mind, leaving her vulnerable to cultural consumption’s gluttonous feast: a phenomenon defined by the sociological theory of tropicalization. This thesis analyzes the way in which the tropicalized tropes of Latina sexuality are represented within the genre of magical realism, culturally consumed as ideological fictions in the United States, and then reclaimed by U.S. Latina authors. Magical feminism is a genre which employs magical realism to comment on the condition of women and this thesis considers three novels of this literary characterization: Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. In analyzing three women-authored texts of magical feminism, this thesis highlights the ways in which this genre undercuts the hegemonic effects of tropicalization and protects the nuanced nature of the U.S. Latina identity.

Comments

Reader: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

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