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
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
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
Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form as Ruin-Reading
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Published:January 2016
Jennifer Harford Vargas, 2016. "Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form as Ruin-Reading", Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar
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This chapter argues that Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a central text in an emerging set of dictatorship novels written by Latinos/as. Considering the tradition of the Latin American dictatorship novel within a broader hemispheric framework reveals that Latino/a novelists are generating a trans-American, counter-dictatorial imaginary that reconceptualizes dictatorial power by constructing intersectional analyses of authoritarianism, racial domination, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism in the hemisphere. The chapter contends that Oscar Wao performs and enacts its broader critique of dictatorial relations through the story’s form. It first demonstrates how the novel marginalizes and parodies the dictator in the overall narrative structure, reallocates responsibility for structures of domination, and centralizes nonnormative characters to challenge authoritarian power and hegemonic discourses. It then shows how the novel’s various structuring devices—specifically hearsay, footnotes, and silences—represent and critique formally the dissemination and repression of information under conditions of domination.
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