Magical / Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders [Hardback]

Description: In MAGICAL/REALISM, poet and essayist Vanessa Angelica Villarreal intimately and fearlessly explores the many complicated girlhoods of being a working-class, first-generation, Mexican American daughter of a cumbia musician. She loved grunge and hated Selena. She found refuge in 80s fantasy movies and in the half-acre of swampy pines behind her Houston home. And she navigated a country that never really saw her-or her family's-value beyond their labor. These essays sharply weave together memoir with explorations of race, class, and gender, using music and pop culture as their axis. In one essay, Vanessa writes about Nirvana's impact on her life as an outcast; in another she looks critically at the Latina body as a site of trouble and all that gets projected onto it. In "When We All Loved a Show About a Wall," Vanessa provides a crucial reading of Game of Thrones, showing its radical political commentaries on borders, asylum, migrant rights, and ICE. And in "The Fantasy of Healing," she connects her own divorce and trauma to the video game The Witcher. With MAGICAL/REALISM, Vanessa recovers the truth from the absences and silences of migration, colonialism, and white supremacy. She looks closely at music as a stand-in for the archive of the undocumented and how pop culture leaves objects behind as portals for memory. This is a wise, tender, expansive collection from a dazzling, essential voice. From award-winning poet Vanessa Angelica Villarreal comes a brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by the forces of migration and colonialism. In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. The trauma of remembering gives the collection its unique structure- Each chapter is an attempt to reimagine and re-world what has been lost. In one essay, Vanessa examines the gender performativity of Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can provide healing when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember-her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce-and finds a new way to archive her history and map her future(s), one infused with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking. By engaging readers in her project of rebuilding narrative, Vanessa broadens our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be. Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories.

Price: 23.18 USD

Location: East Hanover, New Jersey

End Time: 2025-01-01T12:10:51.000Z

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