Challenging metanarratives: A postmodern reading of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God
Challenging metanarratives: A postmodern reading of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God

Summary/Abstract: The current study argues that even though Castillo’s So Far from God bears different features of a postmodern literary text, the novel challenges turning the characters into postmodern subjectivity or mestizo consciousness. The defiance of singular metanarrative logic in Castillo’s novel reflects the characters’ alienation from dominant forms of reasoning. Her novel advocates a practical, flexible politics as an antidote to totalizing, rigid value systems, which Castillo identifies much more strongly with dominant culture than with regional and ethnic identity. Her characters prioritize their own communities’ needs and goals through their willingness to incorporate new ideas. This fluid use of identity contradicts the common critiques of identity politics as essentialist, reductive, or prescriptive. This use of identity as a flexible strategy of resistance inverts the common idea that identity politics are rigid and limiting while general, dominant politics are universal and therefore unlimited. It also questions all handed-down wisdom—does not necessarily reject it, but questions it— encouraging people and communities to draw their own conclusions about which aspects are valid or useful for them and which are not. This perception, therefore, forms a type of double consciousness in which the characters base their view of their home town on the assumptions of the dominant culture rather than on their own experiences and values.

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