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
Dismantling the Master’s House: The Decolonial Literary Imaginations of Audre Lorde and Junot Díaz
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Published:January 2016
Paula M. L. Moya, 2016. "Dismantling the Master’s House: The Decolonial Literary Imaginations of Audre Lorde and Junot Díaz", Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar
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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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