Global fantasy–glocal imagination

Abstract

Globally speaking, fantasy literature has been one of the major literary growth sectors over the last two or three decades. It has enjoyed widespread and serious critical reception while fantastic stories have frequently been rendered into commercially hugely successful films. In contrast to this, there has been either little critical concern with fantasy writing in the New Literatures in English or it has been addressed merely as the remains of a precolonial mythical consciousness making incursions into the world of the realistic storyteller (see, for example, the reception of Amos Tutuola’s work). My paper argues that the fantastic in the New Literatures in English is located at the interface of global and local concerns and creates a glocal literary discourse that establishes its very own imagi/Nation. Prose narratives from India and its diaspora as well as recent Māori writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand will illustrate my thesis and testify that fantasy writing in the New Literatures in English transcends/replaces the diverse binaries at the centre of the postcolonial literary discourse.

Keywords:

• New Literatures in English
• fantasy writing
• glocality and imagination
• Maori/Pacific literature
• Indian English novel

Notes

Lucie Armitt’s remark that “literary modes which are anti‐realist and pro‐fantastic have often been considered more frivolous than the mimetic” (2) may very well apply here, especially under the aegis of constructing an anti‐colonial national literary discourse. Examples are indeed rare among early Indian, Caribbean or African writing in English. See Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960), G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1948), or the writing by Amos Tutuola in the 1950s and 1960s.

A term coined in the early 19th century and used in the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840, signifying the British “governor’s rule” in New Zealand, by contrast to the term rangatiratanga or chiefly sovereignty, which the Maori believed they did not yield to the British Crown in that document.

It may not be inopportune here to comment briefly on Witi Ihimaera’s play Woman Far Walking (2000) with its reversal of the fantastic as presence and the past as real, enacted by the 160‐year‐old Tiriti and her younger alter ego Tilly. Both—the fantastically ancient metamorphosed Tiriti (or Treaty) of Waitangi and her similarly metamorphosed guilt feelings—are made to dramatically present the history of Māori people under colonialism, including their own complicity in the violent colonizing process. The re‐enactment of key experiences at the fantastic level of the play’s presence cleanses Tiriti’s mind in order to overcome her grief and accept her own guilt. A reading of Woman Far Walking that underlines the power of the fantastic imagination to question the binary of “them” and “us” and accept their coming together in the sense that Tiri’s son of a Pākeha father had joined both sides is given by Riemenschneider (2004).

A similar juxtaposition of the future and the past serves Ruchir Joshi in his dystopian historical novel The Last Jet‐Engine Laugh (2001) to thematize quite the opposite of Ghosh’s vaguely optimistic outlook by insisting that there are no more new helpful prayers. Storytelling is merely to show “ki unhone kya kya, kya kya nahi kio”.

Thomas Huttunen argues similarly on “silence”, though not with reference to Hindu thinking (37–38, 41–42).

See Sandra Ponzanesi’s reading (2001). Though I do not altogether disagree with her, her use of the postcolonial writing‐back paradigm, I believe, ignores the novel’s very subtext that lends a decisive role to its fantastic mode, thereby underlining the powerful global function of imagiNation.

For example, with Laakhan as Romen Haldar, Mangala as Mr Aratouninan, Urmila as Tara or Sonali as Maria.

See Riemenschneider (2002, 138–40) for a more extended reading of this poem.

See also the poem’s intertextual references to The Inferno (and, incidentally, S.T. Coleridge and Derek Walcott) facing the acknowledgement page.

See Anne Salmond on Polynesian reverence of Cook that was brought to an end by American missionaries only during the 1840s and 1850s (425–30).