Cultural Realism: Reconsidering Magical Realism in the Works of Contemporary American Women Writers

This book's main contributions happen on three levels; a feminist approach to magical realism, a hemispheric approach in which the literature of women in the Americas is examined and a critical approach to magical realism. Instead of recruiting magic against realism, it reads magic as part of cultural reinvention relevant to collective memory.

This book is committed to women as writers and storytellers; all the selected novels are female-centric in that the main characters are women. The authors, also women, are from three diverse American ethnic groups from both the North and South. Through a close reading of several novels, Babakhani shows how the reinvention of cultural traditions serves these women writers as a political, decolonial, and feminist tool. Babakhani situates her readings in a critique of the concepts of realism and magical realism. Because magical realism sets realism against magic and implies binary oppositions, Babakhani proposes "cultural realism" as a revisionary concept that takes the cultural importance of rituals and beliefs seriously, without simply dismissing them as superstition.