Race and Magical Realism in Young Adult Fiction

fiction are preoccupied with questioning and destabilizing the conventions and establishments of the adult world. While the main function of adolescent literature is socialization and acculturation, subversion and transgression are equally integral elements. According to Latham, magical realism offers a narrative mode through which adolescent literature can achieve the goal of “socialization through subversion” (Latham, 2007, p. 60). This becomes even more prominent in the narratives centering on racial encounters. Focusing on Louis Sachar’s Holes (1998) and Isabel Allende’s City of the Beasts (2002), I argue that the magical realist zone of adolescence destabilizes the established attitudes and narratives that organize racist discourses, hence opening space for renegotiation, revision, and redressing of official history of racial encounters. In these two texts, as the magical elements destabilize and often take over the realistic elements, they also deconstruct the official narratives of the adult world, its history, its knowledge systems, all of which are imbricated with racist ideologies. Holes and City of the Beasts focus on the coming-of-age of young American boys as they encounter the racial “others.” The texts use a variety of folkloric traditions and fantasy motifs like the American tall tale, heroic quest, ceremonial initiation rites, and others, along with the conventions of literary realism. The encounters, set in places that lie outside the borders of the protagonists’ cocooned worlds—a juvenile delinquent camp in Sachar’s text and the Amazonian forest in Allende’s— are as real as they are magical. The adolescents are One of the defining features of magical realism is the way it resonates with the postmodern concern with peripheries and margins. The oxymoron that yokes together two antithetical realms—that of the magical and the real—explores the liminal zone between the two categories, a zone where boundaries are blurred, where the two distinct currents mix and flow into each other. Since it questions the tenets of realism, magical realism emerges as