ECOCRITICISM AND MAGICAL REALISM IN KAREN TEI YAMASHITA’S THROUGH THE ARC OF THE RAINFOREST

Year 2018, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 1 - 12, 17.02.2018

Nesrin Yavaş

Abstract

In her
novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990)
Karen Tei Yamashita deploys magical realist narrative technique to offer a
globally-embracing ecocritical criticism that unfolds global connectivity of
peoples, places, and their destinies. As such, she uses a deterritorialized
environmental approach, which favors eco-cosmopolitanism over bioregionalism,
drawing our attention to the shortcomings of locally-based ecocritical studies
that overlook the inextricable political, social, and cultural connections
between the local and the global in an age of unprecedented mobility and global
modernity. Another environmental issue Yamashati sheds light upon is the fact
of slow violence, a violence, as Rob Nixon argues, appears out of sight, and
over time. To render this invisible violence visible, she employs magical
realism. The intersection between magical realism and ecocriticism in Through the Arc fuels a representational void by
giving shape not only to the insidious workings of global capitalism
masquerading as “scientific development,” and/or “progress” but also to the
slow, invisible environmental violence whose long-term effects bring about
human and environmental cost. 

Keywords

Ecocriticism; Slow Violence;Magical Realism;Globalization;Deterritorialization

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