Junot Diaz

The aim of this paper is to establish a link between the code-switch "tags" in Junot Díaz's work and some formal resources of graffiti artists, in particular their emblematic "tagz." These elements are read together to attest to a battle of the discursive sort being waged in the discursive frontiers of North America, as well as globally in the contact zones between cultures.


RESUMEN
En este trabajo se analiza la relación entre el la alternancia de lenguas en las narraciones de Junot Díaz y ciertos recursos formales empleados por artistas del graffiti. Estos elementos revelan una batalla por el estilo discursivo que se libra en las tierras fronterizas de América del Norte, y globalmente en zonas de contacto cultural.

As one of the most original voices of the 21st century, Junot Diaz uses his novel as a
mouthpiece to expose the oppressive dynamics of gender by delving into the intricate
psychology of male characters who “act” female and female characters who “act” male to
represent how the fluidity of gender is natural, and curtailing these natural characteristics will
lead to catastrophe. This paper aims to reassess the social construction of these gender roles in
Diaz’s novel and analyse how it sends the characters in the novel off a trajectory that is
essentially based upon their ability or inability to transgress the traditional gender norms. By
using the theory of gender performativity put forth by Judith Butler, the paper will undertake
the nuanced analysis of the lives of Oscar, Lola (Oscar’s sister) and Yunior (Lola’s boyfriend)
to emphasise that Oscar is not punished because he does not conform to these traditions but
because he does not challenge them.

Essay: How does the mythic-historical perspective of "fuku americanus" affect your reading of the short stories in Drown?

Creative alternative: write a story originating from a child self perspective in which the child's parents' selves are also retroactively imagined (as in "Negocios")

Unlike much of the scholarship dealing with how manhood is constructed in Díaz’s works, this paper contends that the masculinities embodied by the Yuniors (there are at least two different characters named “Yunior” in Díaz’s fiction) simultaneously enforce and disrupt dominant notions of masculinity. Although Díaz’s characters seem to embrace hegemonic notions of masculinity as a way to fit in, I argue that they are actually engaging in a form of “disidentificatory peformance.” According to queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz, rather than completely identifying or counteridentifying with the performatives that structure white supremacy, misogyny, or homophobia, minority subjects often appropriate and rework these ideologies through a process that he calls “disidentification.” This paper outlines how the male figures in Díaz’s fiction partially disidentify with the racist and homophobic slurs of “Haitian,” “pussy,” and “faggot” that dominant males use to subordinate a young Yunior. Rather than passively accepting this subordination, this paper contends that Yunior transforms the hailing of “Haitian” into a provisional and strategic, rather than fixed, category, and reforms the feminine and homophobic slurs into sites of queer desire.

This chapter offers an overview and theorization of the strand in contemporary American fiction I have dubbed the New Sincerity. Writers whose work is discussed in the chapter include Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead and David Foster Wallace.

Sugar's relation to literary, and more broadly cultural, aesthetics is well studied. For good reasons, much of this existing scholarship focuses on aesthetics in relation to colonial plantations and their lasting legacies. Yet, while the longue durée of capitalism continues to be indispensible for an analysis of the role of sugar, significant changes occurred from the 1870s onwards, which laid the foundations for today's highly uneven, globalised world food system. It is in this context that Dominican and Dominican-American literary aesthetics are particularly revealing, as they register the impact of the rapid integration of the Dominican Republic into the world market through the sugar industry. As I argue, while the political ecology fuelling the foundational romance Enriquillo by Manuel de Jesús Galván (1882) is consciously repressed in the service of producing a national fantasy, the "critical irrealist" aesthetics of Ramón Marrero Arristy's Over (1939) possess at least some disruptive potential. It is in this context that Junot Díaz's insistent focus on style, genre and aesthetics take on their full significance, placing The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao (2007) at the vanguard of thinking around the "worlding" of literary studies as well as about the role of cultural production in what the environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls the capitalist "world-ecology."

Narratives focusing on People of Color often suffer from neocolonial treatment with narrow focus on race at the expense of character development, working with stereotypical monoliths rather than complex individuals. These types of narratives tend to use Whiteness as a “neutral” reference point. In this thesis, I demonstrate how novelist Junot Díaz crafts The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao around a universe that explores narratives and value systems that normalize and center around People of Color. I examine how Díaz presents a multigenerational nebulous investigation of decolonial liminality through the lens of what I term the “decolonized chronotope,” a device for analyzing texts and their cultures in a way that addresses and delinks from colonialist power structures. I analyze the novel dialogically by looking at the interplay of the underlying diaspora, the oscillations––or shifts––between genre, language(s), time, space, perspective), and what the novel’s various internal interactions convey about the larger whole. Using theories from M.M. Bakhtin, alongside Gayatri Spivak, John Muthyala, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, among others, I deconstruct the oscillations that power the decolonized chronotope, as well as examine the nature of diaspora, hegemonic cultural control, and colonialism in the novel.

This article reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a critique of metatestimonial fiction and of the tendency to overstate literature’s power to heal cultural traumas. Metatestimonio bears figurative witness to historical atrocities and interrogates who is or is not allowed to speak of such events. Although Junot Díaz’s narrator Yunior gathers testimony from multiple survivors of the Trujillo regime, he mediates their experiences through his own authorial voice. The novel suggests that in refusing to allow testimony to speak for itself, Yunior (and by extension metatestimonio as a genre) replicates the discursive practices of the regime it denounces. Furthermore, by referencing specific comic book series, the artwork accompanying the 2007 Riverhead edition of the novel generates a counter-narrative critiquing Yunior’s project. This graphic counter-narrative illustrates that ending the Trujillato’s hold on Dominicans is impossible—that certain traumas cannot be healed once and for all. Oscar Wao thus suggests that in claiming literature’s power to heal the past, we (like Yunior) privilege our own desire for resolution over the lived realities of survivors, for whom the working through of trauma is an ongoing and incomplete process.

This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/ and the genres of science fiction and fantasy, which number among this decidedly mainstream novel's most important subjects. In the end, Oscar Wao’s greatest debt to genre fiction lies not in the narrator's presentation of ambiguously supernatural explanations for certain plot events, but in his incessant use of metaphors from sf—such as the Watcher and the Lensman—to describe and understand his own position as narrator-author of the sprawling family saga he relates. The ubiquity and complexity of other genre allusions in the novel prove them to be more than throwaway pop-culture references, testifying to the narrator’s deep engagement with the genre as a legitimate "lens" by which to understand human experience. The essay concludes with an attempt to situate this perspective on science fiction in relation to the current trends within the genre, with particular reference to other contemporary "literary" authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.

La novela o meta-testimonio The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao de Junot Díaz tiene su antecedente peninsular inmediato en El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha de Miguel de Cervantes. La “otakunidad” oscariana, especie de caballería andante contemporánea, es una de las manifestaciones de la influencia cervantina, también visible en el tratamiento de elementos tales como la relación entre historia y ficción, el narrador y los personajes. El “fukú americanus” al que se refiere Junot Díaz como la maldición o signum transmitido de generación en generación, es precisamente la presencia de un padre ante el cual Díaz—como tantos otros escritores caribeños—trata de edificar. El “fukú” deriva del español—código que Díaz subvierte al escribir en inglés—y se manifiesta en la angustia ante la infiltración textual continua del paradigma cervantino. El “zafa” de Díaz es símbolo de superación del padre (“separarse”)—cual tejido o identidad literaria—que signa The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

La novela dominicana/yankee del escritor Junot Díaz La Maravillosa Vida Breve de Oscar Wao fue publicada en el año 2007 por la editorial Alfaguara. Como señala Victor Barrera Enderle en su artículo sobre “la alfaguarización de la literatura hispanoamericana”,

Despite the extensive economic and political globalization of the contemporary world, the presence and significance of international borders is still one of the most compelling influences on the lives of billions of human beings. A border (or sometimes the lack of one) can become the site of conflict between groups, or the crossing of a border can mean finding refuge from such conflict. Determining who can cross a border and who cannot is among the most immediate forms of power that a nation-state can exert, both on its own citizens and on “aliens,” whether they are already residing within those borders or attempting to cross them from outside. We will examine seven works of fiction and three films (all published/released within the last twenty years) that depict various ways in which borders – both literal and figurative – and the crossings thereof affect the lives of migrants, paying special attention to the distinction between voluntary and involuntary forms of migration.

We will begin the course with an excerpt from John Torpey’s 2000 book, _The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State_, with an eye towards gaining a clearer understanding of how the contemporary legal practices surrounding national citizenship came into being, as well as how they relate to (and complicate) the underlying cultural realities regarding the ways human communities divide and subdivide themselves. Torpey’s work offers both a conceptual and tonal primer to some of the issues regarding transnational mobility that are depicted in the books and films we’re examining this semester.

[Pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Essays in Honour of Benita Parry, edited by Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma (Routledge 2018)].

Expanding on Löwy’s description of “critical irrealism,” Benita Parry’s formulation of peripheral aesthetics identifies a tendency to juxtapose “the mundane and the fantastic, the recognizable and the improbable, the seasonal and the eccentric, the earthborn and the fabulous, the legible and the oneiric, historically inflected and mystical states of consciousness” (Parry 2009, 39). She heralds critical consciousness of combined and uneven development on the part of semi-peripheral intellectuals in proximity to social contradictions and political struggle as likely to result in an elective affinity for experimentation with irrealist narrative techniques that re-activate residual materials and combine literary and cultural forms: “Such proximity of discordant discourses and discrete narrative registers, can be seen as aesthetic forms that transcend their sources in the novel’s social ground, becoming abstract significations of the incommensurable and the contradictory which are concurrent in the material and cultural worlds of a periphery” (39). If Parry’s work has focused more on fabulist, oneiric, and surrealist varieties of “peripheral modernism,” in this essay, I will explore the unevenness of “peripheral genres”: the inter-mixing of SF and fantasy genres with realist modalities, offering an exemplary reading of Oscar Wao as a novel that invites a world-systemic reading in its counter-fitting of speculative genre conventions to create an “extreme narrative” (Díaz cited in Obejas 2009, 46).

The developments in communications and transport in relatively recent times have turned travel to faraway destinations and interaction with people at great distances into a relatively easy process. Immigration particularly goes hand in hand with colonisation, since it was only after this period that great flows of people started moving to different lands in order to improve their living conditions, and the echoes of this historical event can still be heard in the present. The United States of America is a case in point, since their multicultural slogans seem to contradict their exclusionist policies of deportation and extreme border control. This is even deeply realised in the case of refugees or immigrants, who find themselves in a foreign land that seems to try to help them and at the same time limits them or, in the worst case, marginalises them even when they are legally part of the country. In fact, the definition of 'nation' seems to have adopted new meanings at present, for countries no longer are formed by one ethnicity, one religion, one culture, and one language, which has been the topic for many literary pieces over the years. This, among other topics, is explored in Junot Díaz's fiction, particularly in three short stories. "Aguantando," "Negocios," and "Invierno" are interrelated narrations that tell the story of a family from the Dominican Republic who are divided by different types of borders. This paper focuses on analysing the different borders that the characters in the last two stories face, particularly Yunior and Ramón, and how transculturation and acculturation are two sides of the coin of an immigrant’s identity.

The adolescent main characters in the narratives we have read so far this semester have all been weighed down by intergenerational trauma: death, murder, and war; sexual violation and secrets; being used as a "poison container" by family members; slavery, racism, terrorism, and violence.

Three novels in particular (Hurston, Baldwin, Diaz) have provided, by various means, perspectives on these historical traumas beyond the verbal grasp of the main SELF character in the NOW of the story. In three of our books-Baldwin, Bechdel, Diaz-a large focus is on the "sins of the fathers"-the traumatic events of previous generations that are bequeathed to the main character, who must cope with this legacy as they attempt to launch into adult life.

These books offer speculative representations of the SELF's parents' inner life and history before the birth of the SELF character. This suggests that in order to enter into the existential predicament of a person, one must be privy not only to the person's conscious perspective but to the psychohistorical waters in which he or she is submerged. In other words, a full narrative portrait of an adolescent may require understanding not only of that person's articulated experience, but also his or her submerged experience of family, history, and culture in the wake of traumas that remain unspoken, unresolved, and hidden.

Pulitzer-prize winning author Junot Díaz stages culture clashes in his work by dramatizing the linguistic tension between English and Spanish. This strategy, which he calls “linguistic simultaneity” (code-switching), is central in his fiction because it expresses his Latino identity, and it is artistically and politically significant. Translators who wish to recreate his texts for another readership are forced to rethink what translation is and thus to consider new paradigms, since code-switching defies the traditional conception of translation as the transposition from one closed linguistic system to another. Translations into one of the languages that make up the fictional universe of the source text (in this case, Spanish) are especially challenging. Focusing on the extent to which translators transpose the linguistic simultaneity of Díaz’s source texts, this paper explores the possible reader responses to strategies used to maintain or downplay linguistic tension in the target texts. A comparison of two translations into Spanish of Diaz’s short stories “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars” and “Otravida, Otravez” from This is How You Lose Her (2012) will illustrate how linguistic simultaneity is recreated.

Článok sa zaoberá tromi okruhmi problémov. Skúma význam a použitie slova „koloniálny“ v americkom kultúrnom prostredí a poukazuje na konkrétne historické príklady, ktoré umožňujú hodnotiť USA ako postkoloniálnu krajinu. Druhým okruhom problémov je vzťah postmoderny a postkolonializmu, na ktorý autorka poukazuje na základe teoretických tvrdení Lindy Hutcheonovej. Ako konkrétny príklad vzťahov, prepojení a posunov, autorka v záverečnej časti článku interpretuje román súčasného amerického spisovateľa Junota Díaza The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ako postmoderný a postkoloniálny román.

The work which will be the primary source of analysis in this paper is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) by Junot Díaz. The novel places the concept of diasporic identity formation as a challenge which directly affects the daily lives of second generation Dominican-Americans living in Latino and Caribbean majority neighbourhoods in the United States. These groups often suffer categorisation practices imposed on them both by the mainstream North American society and by members of their same community. These practices, added to the generational gap between them and their immigrant parents, often translate into fragility and fragmentation when developing an identity. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been chosen for the paper because it includes some chapters dealing with the past of the Dominican Republic. In this way, it does not consider diaspora an isolated phenomenon, but rather relates it to past historical events. The purpose of the broad historical scope of the novel is to highlight the importance of transmitting a critical historical memory of the country of origin to the second-generation individual. Documenting the
past might help these characters overcome fragility in the formation of a stable Dominican-American identity. This need to provide young  generations with critical historical information is reflected in the novel through the efforts that the narrator makes to recollect and retell the
personal story of Oscar, the protagonist of the book, and his family.

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and resis- tance. I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical ele- ment of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels in the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo’s Shadows of Your Black Memory and Junot Dıaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings, the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender violence inherent to coloniality.

El presente artículo consiste en un estudio comparado que abarca la
mayor parte de la obra publicada de Dany Laferrière, Junot Díaz y
Jamaica Kincaid, tres voces fundamentales de la diáspora antillana
en Norteamérica. Se emplea explícitamente en la urgente tarea de
incorporar a la reflexión en torno al sexo un análisis de las relaciones
de opresión presentes en toda muestra de cultura. El estudio está
motorizado precisamente por la relación de la muestra elegida (las
Antillas) con el objeto de estudio (el sexo). No en vano el Caribe,
en general, ha sido y sigue siendo objeto de una notable producción
cultural y económica, tanto externa como interna, que gira en torno al
sexo. Este artículo, inserto inevitablemente en esa tradición de orígenes
coloniales, es un intento a su vez de replicar críticamente a la misma y
de reivindicar una alternativa que asuma la complejidad de interacción
de las distintas opresiones.

“Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction

Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike.

Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change.

Works Cited

Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.