Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination
Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.
Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.
Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.
Disability is a central concern in Junot Díaz’s work. His characters’ bodies show the effects of poor nutrition, addiction, overwork, inadequate housing, and cancer. The stories “Ysrael” and “No Face,” from Drown, depict a young boy in the Dominican Republic whose face is disfigured after a pig attacks him as a baby. “Nilda,” “Miss Lora,” and “The Pura Principle,” from This Is How You Lose Her, show a young man dying of cancer and the emotionally complicated aftermath of his death. In both short story collections, disability and disease are linked to two of Díaz’s primary interests as a writer: the unstable boundaries between narrative forms, and the legacies of the conquest of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade. By linking disability to these larger issues in Díaz’s fiction, this chapter argues that a critical disability perspective on Díaz’s fiction offers new theoretical insights about the aesthetics of decolonization.
Advertisement
