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

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.