Felicity Gee reviews "Diasporic Marvellous Realism" for Wasafiri

“Alonso’s account of the twists and turns in the history of magical realism, and the differences between lo real maravilloso and realismo mágico, is one of the best that I have read — proving that much has still to be said on the mode’s evolutionary chronology. The book’s carefully considered analysis takes in Gilroy, Hall, Bhabba, Donnell and a host of critical voices, resulting in clear definitions of diasporic identity politics and geo-political struggle post-boom that set the stage for evocative readings of Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads and The New Moon’s Arms, Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman, David Dabydeen’s Our Lady of Demerara (2004) and Cyril Dabydeen’s poetry, as well as his novella Dark Swirl (1989) with its massacouraman motif, among others. Many of the elements Alonso chooses to support her theory of the diasporic experience of space and place are directly related to magical realism – slave narratives, mestizo identities, multi-focalised narrative, neo-baroque landscapes – but take on added urgency in the process of overwhelming defamiliarisation and transterritorialisation. Particularly compelling is her summation that diasporic magical realist writing addresses lacunae left in the master narratives and official historical archives that define a ‘nation’, or a set of ‘national’ practices. Her choice of Diasporic Marvellous Realist writers works extremely well to demonstrate the central thesis that the past, when channelled through particular memories (especially traumatic memories of migration or exile) ‘acquires a transcendental dimension under the burden of transterritorialization’ (73).”