magical realism: vanessa angélica villareal

Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy and Borders, by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. New York, USA: Tiny Reparations Books. 2024. 370pp.

Scholars and journalists alike have used personal experience and autoethnography to ground their analysis of popular culture. Autoethnography offers the writer a way of reflecting and sifting through their experiences, examining “relevant personal and cultural texts, including photographs, personal diaries, popular press books, blogs, and podcasts…to determine how their experiences and stories contribute to, complement, and contrast with others’ experiences and stories” (Adams, Holman Jones, and Ellis 2014:49). In Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Villarreal excavates her memories and phases of her life to offer a Mestiza and Latin American critical cultural analysis of the narrative genres Magical Realism and Fantasy, music by Selena, Nirvana and Beyonce, television shows like Game of Thrones, and video games such as Assassins Creed. Although Villarreal doesn’t provide a precis on her methodology in the collection, it becomes apparent from the opening chapter that, as an autoethnographer, Villarreal uses memory-as-fieldwork to “follow…clues, bridge…gaps, and…remedy uncertain and unsatisfying cultural accounts” (2014:49–50).

Before I came across Vanessa's book, I’d never heard of the genre or concept of ‘Magical Realism’. Nevertheless, the title was not what drew me in; I became eager to read it after seeing the blurb:

In MAGICAL/REALISM: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

Dr Villarreal is a poet and academic. She has a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California. Vanessa, being a poet, was the second reason I felt compelled to read Magical/Realism: I believe poets make excellent narrative nonfiction writers. As adept translators of difficult-to-decipher feelings and the fragility of the self, poets make plain the ephemerality of emotions like trauma, grief, and anger. My favourite book last year was Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue, a gorgeous, heartbreaking and profound meditation on life with friendship at the centre — when it happens accidentally. So, I was excited to read another memoir-esque piece from a poet.

Magical/Realism is a rich, generative collection of essays. Dr Villarreal uses Saidiya Hartman’s technique of critical fabulation, a writing technique of imagining history when archives or otherwise cannot provide ‘truth’. Critical fabulation argues, “by playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view”, it is possible to “jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done” (Hartman 2008:11). Villarreal employes critical fabulation especially in essays about her family, particularly the vagueties about her mother’s undocumented status in the US. In the opening essay, “About A Girl”, in 54 footnotes —which echo the kind of raw and piercing analysis found in Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes—  Villarreal provides the reader with a cartography of how she came to be. She writes of her memory being defragged like a Windows computer. She writes of the pain of navigating silences about one's lineage and past. She writes of patriarchy and colonial violence and its relationship to rupturing and destroying girlhoods, memory and history. In “About A Girl”, we are invited into Villarreal’s analytical lens and the terrain she’s traversed to bring us this book. I say terrain because Magical/Realism is a memoir as much as it is an academic text of media and cultural analysis. Villarreal shares of the interruptions in her youth: underpaid parents, drug use, sexual violence, racist schooling and their result: complex post traumatic disorder, a diagnosis culminating after years of emotional abuse from her ex-husband. 

There are several themes in the collection, migration, borders, colonial and intimate violence, and the ways Villareal has attempted to heal from these. The context are the themes, but the subtext is healing through fantasy television and video games and music. The former themes are explored heavily in the first half of the book, where the essays lean more into the memoir genre. For example in “La Canción De La Nena,” Villarreal shares of her upbringing in Texas, and the ways poverty and discrimination are baked into zip codes, “The people who live in the Texas borderland navigate a terrain of overlapping colonial systems, reality pushed and pulled across the border’s blade so much that it creates a rupter in time itself. On one side modernity…on the other the “undeveloped Latin America, always a decade behind…” (2024:58). 

In the second half of the book, the essays use pop culture to discuss the aforementioned context and subtext. It is in these essays that Villareals critical cultural analysis is the most pointed and sharp. The inventive and boundary pushing, meta-textual essay, “Volver, Volver” is a standout piece of analysis and storytelling. Villareal weaves close reading of Beyonce’s Lemonade to point out the ways women of colour must perform emotional and sexual labour in relatioships wrecked by intimate partner violence. She also touches on philosophy and the coloniality of Western epistemologies. 

Villarreal is a true transdisciplinary scholar, I greatly appreciated reading other scholar’s work in her writing, Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, but also Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, and Édouard Glissant. Magical/Realism’s strength is in it use of feminist theory and cultural theory to provide renewed readings of American popcultural heavyweights. Villarreal’s deft use of critical race theory, and knowledge of history, for example, to illustrate the ways that videos games such as Assassins Creed use of Germanic paganism and imagery plays into dangerous myths of ‘white genocide’ — “White Apocalypse: The Story We Keep Telling” (2024:256).

The only fault I have with the collection is a ridiculous one — and that is that it is so rich with insight that it is hard to describe, or pin point exactly where it fits —  though I have tried to here. I also wish that an index was included for easier navigating!

Magical/Realism is a phenomenal collection of essays, suitable for students and researchers in cultural studies, media and communications, feminist and gender studies. I know I will return to it again and again.

References

Adams, Tony E., Stacy Linn Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis. 2014. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. ‘Venus in Two Acts’. Small Axe 12(2):1–14.

moving abroad is not like the movies

Four years ago, during the summer of black squares and the first COVID summer, I lived with (in) my ex-boyfriend’s dachgeschoss wohnung (German for ‘attic/top of house apartment’) in Berlin. Being a top-floor flat in an old building, the heat that swirled and sweltered around me felt oppressive, but not more than the toxic, tumultuous, stepping-on eggshell tension that was that relationship.

You see, two years earlier, I’d accepted a remote job in Germany in tech that allowed me to tick off my “live on the continent and learn a language” from my bucket list. I imagined myself going to group language lessons and making fast friends with someone else who also new in town. I Googled quaint German towns with the hopes of taking advantage of Germany’s relatively affordable and reliable (in comparison to the UK’s) rail services. I scrolled Pinterest, thinking of how I’d decorate my altbau apartment, getting excited at the idea of stronger tenant rights, which allowed German residents to do much more to their abodes than I could back in Blighty.

In short, I romanticised my life a lil too hard.

There is something addicting about starting again. It’s a chance to idealise putting your best foot forward; new home, new job, new city, new you!! The allure of a blank slate is so magnetic, and the media archive of young gals about town doing it for themselves is full. Unfortunately, in my experience, Emily in Paris is it not. Moving abroad alone is hard, difficult work — amplified by being Black, a woman, and too damn old to deal with nonsense.

At 25, when I moved to Melbourne, Australia alone I had youthful innocence and a lack of self-assuredness that meant dealing with exoticism from Australian men, shitty landlords, inappropriate bosses and fake friendships was something I stumbled through. Now, a decade later at 35 — I don’t have time. Call me cynical, but I have been in therapy for too damn long to deal with any of that. This means, that this move — my fourth in four years — I am much less excited. Don’t get me wrong, I am lucky: I have a great remote job that pays me six figures, which is, insanely, something that is needed to live in one of the most expensive cities in Canada. Having employment and a solid immigration status (I’m a Canadian citizen) are two massive plusses in the international moving game. However, there are still barriers: banking is set up entirely differently here; I have no credit score; I have to wait two months to access healthcare; I am a Black woman, and the Black population where I live is tiny; I know the city from youth, but I don’t know what it’s like to live here as an adult; I only know one person; I’m in a long distance relationship.

All of these small but re-constitutive things add up to increase the friction and difficulty of settling in; especially when research shows that to do so takes between 18 and 36 months. Researcher Melody Warnick found that to feel as though a place you live is home —quantified by one metric of having 2-3 people you can call to hang out at any one time— takes much longer than we realise. Relationality is not guaranteed by living in a ‘nice’ neighbourhood with a community centre and local coffee shop. It takes consistency, commitment and showing up. In the age of TikTok, shrinking social security and the decimation of third spaces, the notion of community is fractured and tenuous. It is not as easy as it once was to meet your neighbours. Moving alone forces you to confront tiny anxieties almost every day, because there is no one else to help you; you have to go through it.

My last move nearly broke me and our relationship. I was so miserable in the UK that it clouded everything, I’ve only recently realised how unhappy I was now that I’ve left. I was constantly broke because doing a PhD requires so much of you that I could only do bits and pieces of consulting work. The fascism. Keir Starmer. The cost of living. The obsession with drinking. The grey! Oh god, the grey. Liverpool was not the place for me, but honestly, it would have been the same anywhere else on that island. I hadn’t meant to stay so long back in Blighty, I only came back to escape the aforementioned terrible relationship in Berlin and complete my MA degree, but then I met L and decided to do my PhD, and well life happens. So when I got this new job that I could do from anywhere, I begrudgingly knew I had to gtfo.

And so we are here. My 10th move in 10 years, and my re-entry to Canada. I signed a lease on a one bedroom apartment a block away from my only friend here. I’ve started the long, slow, and expensive process of furnishing a home. My precious items are in boxes in a container ship, somewhere between Dorset and Hong Kong right now. I’ve joined a gym. I’m starting to get a feel for my favourite cafes and side streets. I’ve just been paid (we’re paid bimonthly in Canada!) and now that I can afford life again, life feels easier. It’s not perfect by any means. I am nowhere near settled. I don’t know where to buy Nigerian food. My boyfriend is 3000+ miles away. I am surrounded my many memories of my mum, and she’s not here.

I am starting over again at 35, and I am SO DAMN TIRED of doing so. But for the first time in a while, I feel hopeful for the future. And that is something to hold on to.

me in my new flat

sitting tight when you're hanging in there

I don’t have the words, but I want to speak.

I don’t have a theme for this newsletter, and sitting at my kitchen table in Bochum as I write, I feel silly. I feel silly writing letters to MPs to call for a ceasefire. I feel silly posting on IG about quotidian aspects of my life, and then two moments later – watching reels of Palestinians shielding in rubble, begging for intervention from the world.

To quote Tressie McMillan Cottom, “We were not meant to see so much,” but then I immediately think, but we are seeing it. And we’re being told it’s not happening. Living through —with various degrees of impact— several geopolitical, environmental and social collapses is slowly making me become more insular, and more selfish, although I fight against it. I can feel my mind pleading: this is too much – seek distraction.

I do not have energy.
I have, really, so little power.
What can one person do?

I feel the impact of Tory rule and of austerity, poisoning my patience for the collective, and for my ability to keep trying. In England we live and learn that everything is broken, but if some people can pay for privatisation, they deserve a better experience. And what about those who cannot?

Pervasive anti-Black rhetoric makes me steel myself for what seems like inevitable discrimination. It is not normal to constantly make risk assessments for opportunities you wish to take, or have. While living here in Germany now, I walk around in perpetual flight or fight mode. I search for protests to attend on IG, having not heard a single person at my Fellowship discuss current affairs. I think about how British governments continue to poison both my micro and macro worlds.

At times like these, of witnessing war crimes while scrolling Twitter, then subsequently logging onto a Zoom meeting on research methods —the personal and political feel more detached than ever. I am personally not affected, but my politics demand me to act.

In To Exist is to Resist, Dr’s Francesca Sobande and Akwugo Emejulu write

Our struggle for our humanity is revolutionary political action that imagines another world is possible beyond the plunder, exploitation and expropriation that are the bedrock of liberal democracies. It is important to stress that Black feminism does not merely operate against violence and exclusion but creates and fosters a different way of seeing and being in this world. Black feminism is always a creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise.

In the midst of the horrors, it is a Black feminist act to show up and protest imperialist violence, and live with relationality, towards yourself and others, all the ways hegemonic powers tell you it’s not possible to. Joining a protest, writing MPs letters, mutual aid — sending money to Gazans. Refusing to take the divide and conquer bait — are all tactics towards living otherwise.

It is not enough, but it is all I have.

I leave you with my favourite song of the year.

research notes: #2

I’ve been reading a lot about intimacy, friendship and belonging. Intimacy and friendship are two central concepts that I engage with in my conceptual framework. In an earlier draft I sent to my supervisors, I wrote, “Lauren Berlant’s (1998) introduction to Critical Inquiry is a necessary starting point.” My supervisor commented that he agreed, but because Berlant builds on even earlier sociological work from Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, I’d also need to provide a short gloss on their work. I obliged.

I found Giddens’ work uninspiring. I find work on late modernity from white men uninspiring (perhaps I’ll write a short positionality statement to absolve myself from explaining why 🙃). Giddens (1), whose work covers late modernity and its impact on identity, intimacy, and relationships with the State, also wrote about how people with different identity categories will have varying experiences with all of the above (so an intersectional consideration). However, he also finds it befitting to speak with such violent authority on Black womanhood, perpetuating stereotypes and flattening Black women’s lives in an essentialist doctrine.

Giddens, 1991 p. 86

After I had recovered from the whiplash of reading a white man’s take on Black women, I realised, in my desire to go “back to the beginning” of critical intimacy studies in this section of my conceptual framework, I had minimised my research’s epistemological underpinning of Black feminism. As a Black feminist research study, I not only centre the lived experiences of Black women but also build and engage with other Black women’s work on intimacy. I re-read sections of All About Love by bell hooks, and looked through my notes on Saidya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

Intimacy is central to theorising Black being and belonging.

They both touch on intimacy but not in the ways I was looking for, so I turned to Keguro Machiara’s Frottage. I have only read the introduction, so a book review is inappropriate here, but Frottage has provided me with a language to expand my thinking on Black diasporic intimacies. Their writing on Black diaspora theory —which goes above and beyond ideas of the Nation-State— produces evidence of a deep Black-people-specific kind of intimacy (2019, p.14). Frottage is an art “technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art” (2). Keguro conceptualises frottage by placing the term in the context of Black bodies in the hold, rubbing up and against each other. The forced intimacy of slavery against (s)kinfolk. Frottage makes sense of several different rubbings occurring,

“bodies against each other; bodies against the ship; writing implements against ledgers; and the rubbing in the slave holds against the writing in the ledgers. I use the term frottage to figure these violent rubbings and to foreground the bodily histories and sensations that subtend the arguments I pursue” (2019, p. 12-13).

Intimacy is central to theorising Black being and belonging. Keguro’s Frottage is a metaphor for the intimacy bound up in Blackness. It is inextricably linked because of the/our history and the legacy modernity left: a visual language for anti-Blackness, that continues to bind us together in the present.

I am unsure how to put it eloquently into words (or the exact literature I will use to strengthen my argument). Still, intimacy between and from Black people to our chosen kin is a sacred, affective element. There is a subjective, interior understanding of being seen in the context of Black women’s digital intimacies, friendship, kinship, or sisterhood. It is psychological safety; sometimes, this can translate to physical security when whiteness is concerned.

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My PhD thesis, like my Master's dissertation, is autoethnograpy. I'm a dual citizen; 'home' is a complicated notion. I am English, but I do not feel or sound English. My many years living abroad in Canada, Germany, Thailand, and Australia, caused me to become a diaspora in liminal apposition, suspended in a state of ambivalence due to multiple migrations from home to foreign land and back. I contest that London is my 'home' while benefiting from an immigration status that affords me 'home' status in the Academy. Yet, as a Black British woman, I (am made to?) feel out of place. In line with Black feminist praxis, I use autoethnography to validate my knowledge and experiences as theory (3) and to "be vulnerable enough to write myself into this story” (4). Doing the work, and engaging with research and literature on Black intimacies and belonging, is crucial to my conceptual framework and autoethnographic method.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! I don’t plan what to say in these —the spirit moves me, and I be writing. If watching is more your style, I’ve been vlogging my journey to my Upgrade Viva (Proposal Defense) on YouTube, too.

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1 Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1st ed.). Polity.

2 Oxford Dictionary of English. Frottage.

3 Collins, P. H. (1991). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Reprint). Routledge.

4 Dr. Amanda Bennett. (2021). PhD Prospectus. Duke University.