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.
Junot Díaz’s Search for Decolonial Aesthetics and Love
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Published:January 2016
José David Saldívar, 2016. "Junot Díaz’s Search for Decolonial Aesthetics and Love", Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar
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This chapter examines aesthetics, dispossession, trauma, and decolonial love in Díaz’s fiction. It theorizes a footnote from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that critically reflects on Oscar’s spectacularly closeted reading of science fiction and fantasy books and the effects Oscar’s reading in the closet have on his family and friends. It argues that closeted reading challenges readers to think critically about what happens to immigrant rising kids when they read imaginative literature and, more important, what goes on in their complex inner lives. The chapter concludes by focusing on Yunior’s fulsome search for decolonial love in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” The chapter reads Díaz’s texts as extended exercises in dissident antihomophobic inquiry and racial hermeneutics, which have important implications for theories about the coloniality of power and gender, identity, sexuality, and their interrelation.
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