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.
Doing Race in Spanglish
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Published:January 2016
This chapter reads Díaz alongside the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde to highlight Díaz’s concern with race, class, gender, and sexuality as mutually constituting and consequential aspects of identity. It begins with a consideration of the place of race in Díaz’s fiction to engage recent characterizations of his work as postrace, before addressing those features of his work that place him in a genealogy of activist writers that includes women of color writers such as Lorde. It ends with a reading of the short story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” in Drown, as a fictional exploration of the corrosive effects of the racial self-hatred that remains a legacy of European colonialism for people of color in the Americas. The essay illuminates that, for all their temporal, generic, stylistic, gender, and sexual differences, Díaz and Lorde are engaged in complementary critical projects.
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