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.
