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ISBN-13:

9780822374763

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 08/31/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 448
File size: 1 MB

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.

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Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination

By Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7476-3

CHAPTER 1

Against the "Discursive Latino"

The Politics and Praxis of Junot Díaz's Latinidad

Arlene Dávila

I was in Puerto Rico when El Nuevo Día published an interview with Junot Díaz during his visit to the Festival de la Palabra in 2011, the same trip he had vividly recalled during one of our coffee get-togethers in New York City. True to the Junot Díaz I know, his recollection was not about what happened at the festival or about any literary gossip. Instead, it was about the rapid capitalism and colonialism that had colored his visit to the island. He marveled at how sanitized Puerto Rico had felt to him, at how he had only hung out with intellectuals, remarking on the social segregation he experienced, which he attributed to the island's devastating colonialism and capitalism. The interview was titled "La rebeldía de leer," after Díaz's statements in defense of books and of reading as antidote. As he put it, "It is impossible to compete when you're reading, when you're focused on a novel or a poetry book ... All those vices that capitalism promotes to keep us 'full' in the market, art helps us lessen a bit" (or, in his words, "el arte nos ayuda a cortar un chín").

When I began to write about Junot Díaz, a literary powerhouse but also a dear friend and colleague, I hesitated, imagining that others would certainly do a better job of giving Díaz's literary work its due. Then I realized that I could write about the Díaz that many people do not know about, not only because they have not had him as a colleague or shared quotidian coffee get-togethers with the author, but also because interviews and exposés of Junot Díaz have seldom seized on Díaz as the critical participant-observer and ethnographer or as the political activist and passionate Latino advocate that I know him to be. These are qualities that are seldom explored in the many literary exposés and interviews with the author that have tended instead to focus on more traditionally personal topics such as his immigrant past, his upbringing, the provenance of his characters, or more specific aspects of his writing. Among them, Díaz's use of history, his mixing of genres and references from science fiction to comic books, and his inventive mixing of Spanish, street vernaculars, Dominican slangs, and English are especially prominent themes. Still, his political positions and drives, while always palpable, are seldom probed. In fact, when Díaz the political commentator and activist comes out, it seems to always create uproar and surprise, as if these positions were not already evident in his body of work. Recent examples include Díaz's bold criticism of the Dominican Republic's decision to strip Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican citizenship, and his statements against Israeli policies toward Palestinians. In both cases, critics responded by raising questions about his "Dominicaness" or by accusing him of "hating Jews," as if Díaz's critical exposés of these instances of racial discrimination, white supremacy, and global empire represented major betrayals, rather than long-time concerns of his work. Díaz's vehement critique of the Dominican government's 2013 ruling to expel Haitian immigrants and strip Haitian-descended Dominicans of citizenship is even more significant in light of the relative silence that characterized the Latino/a media and the mainstream activist community on the issue until days before the ruling began to be executed in the summer of 2015. Throughout, Junot's Facebook page served as the source of information, news, and commentary exposing the racist foundations of the ruling, and strengthening the larger diaspora-led activism of groups like "We Are All Dominican" to fuel a larger #BlackLivesMatter Everywhere movement linking the Dominican immigration debacle to a rising tide of anti-black racism.

Of course, Díaz's pride in his Dominican, Caribbean, and Latino background and his assertive and perceptive critiques of the larger social ills affecting Latinos/as and people of color more generally are well known to anyone who has met the author or attended one of his readings. How could they not? The point is that when Díaz is discussed by the literati, his political opinions are somehow lessened through more formalist treatment of his work, as if to fit him into dominant artistic requirements for art and its creators as "universal" — above and beyond particular politics. In particular, his vehement activist stance and critique of racism and white supremacy, which at the Stanford symposium he described as key elements of his work, are repeatedly missed. Thus, in what follows, I want to delve deeper into two elements that I consider central to his interventions into contemporary Latino/a cultural politics and to what he informally refers to as "our Latino/a project" or "movimiento," thereby providing some additional texture to appreciate his literary work. First is his critical and assertive engagement with Latinidad and how this position impacts his work as well as his political involvements and activism, which both engage with but also extend beyond any ethnic, specific, or nationalist defined boundary. Second is Díaz's consistent critique of capitalism, which is best appreciated as a critique of the simultaneity of global racism and capitalism (akin to Aníbal Quijano's coloniality of power) that touches on all aspects of contemporary society, as well as Latinos' position in it. I suggest that these two strands are informed by Díaz's keen ethnographic eye, as both a social observer and active participant in contemporary Latino/a cultural politics, and that they come together in what I describe as Díaz's praxis-oriented and antidiscursive Latino/a political project. This project puts him in conversation with ethnic studies scholars, activists, and grassroots cultural workers, as well as with anyone who is actively involved in creating progressive political imaginaries more readily than with other writers or literary figures.

I want to start with a formative moment in his trajectory: his student activism over ethnic studies and more specifically over the strengthening of Latino/a Studies at Cornell University during the historic strike and takeover of Day Hall in 1993. Indeed, the occupation at Cornell was the first event Díaz mentioned when I shared with him my ideas for this chapter, and I soon learned why. Díaz was one of the students who took over the administration building to protest the vandalizing of an artwork by a Chicano, a piece that was part of a group of site-specific installations by Latino artists on campus. The students charged that the university administration had not protected the artwork, which was vandalized repeatedly with anti-Latino slurs, and that the university had contributed to the hostile racial climate that enabled the racist incident. The students' four-day occupation of Day Hall was accompanied by numerous demands, including the hiring of more Latino/a faculty and the diversification of the curriculum, demands that led to the establishment of a Latino Living Center and to the strengthening of Cornell University's Latino/a Studies Program through additional hires.

For Díaz, the experience at Cornell was "the moment where everything came together." This is how he put it:

I was in Cornell, completely alienated from the white students in my MFA program, and from all undergraduate students of color, and with no space to get to know anybody. But then Latino studies brought this incredible artist Daniel Martínez, who made that extraordinary piece in the front of the quad, and for a budding artist, to see this Latino and his work at the center of the university, in a way that it had never been. When this piece went up the world and Cornell had to deal with Latino artists — the whole university had to stop.

Díaz described this experience as a germinal moment in his understanding of how art connects to politics and to communities, as well as a formative lesson about the political potential of a really progressive work of art. Martínez's installation became especially charged after it was stamped with anti-Latino graffiti, which became the crystallizing moment expressing the active racism that until then had remained largely invisible. Once vandalized, the political potential of the piece was maximized and racism was finally made visible in a way that validated Díaz's sentiments and those of other students who experienced racism on a daily basis, both implicitly and explicitly. Most important, the artwork's reception and the Latino/a students' response became the catalyst for demands that transcended the immediacy of the event to touch on the position of Latinos/as within the university and society at large. Junot had experienced student activism at Rutgers, primarily Afrocentric and feminist activism. Cornell, however, represented his first Latino- centered movement, a pivotal event that, as he described, "activated, charged and energized his Latinoness," more than any other place or event he had experienced.

Almost twenty years later, the battle over Latino/a and ethnic studies continues; these programs are increasingly affected by the growing postracialism and anti-immigrant xenophobia that envelops our society, which have surfaced as especially contested battlegrounds in states like Arizona, where Mexican American studies was recently banned from the curriculum. In fact Díaz was in good company in Arizona; his books were banned alongside Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Pedro Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, among other key texts in critical race theory and Mexican American history and literature that were all deemed guilty of "promot[ing] resentment toward a race or class of people" and "advocat[ing] ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." Such a move of course ignored how the racist curriculum, centered on Euroamerican and Anglo-American culture, does exactly that against people of color. Indeed, ample research by education scholars has documented the dominance of Euroamerican perspectives in mainstream curricula and how the overwhelming dominance of Euroamerican perspectives contributes to minority students' disengagement from academic learning. In sum, Latino/a and minority students learn better and more, and have overall higher graduation rates, when they learn through inclusive curricula that resonate with their experiences. Something transformative and empowering occurs when students in my Latino/a studies classes in New York first learn about the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, about the legacy of the Spanish-American War, and about the first colonias hispanas in New York City. And it is obvious that leaders in Arizona are very afraid of the possibility of having more educated and unafraid Latinos/as in their state. For now, the ban has brought renewed attention to issues of education, empowerment, and race, fueling a much needed revalorization of ethnic studies, which may challenge our distancing from the social struggles that made these programs possible, as more of us become savvy in the antiracism talk but less willing to take the definite positions necessary to defend the integrity of these hard-won spaces in the postracial academy.

Díaz, however, has never wavered from the need to defend spaces where Latinos/as can shine, strive, and build community. He remains an active supporter of ethnic studies and of Latino-led organizations, as well as of a variety of progressive Latino/a groups, just as he was when we first met almost fifteen years ago as junior faculty members at Syracuse University. Except his support now extends to other grassroots community organizations and groups that many Latino/a and ethnic studies intellectuals would be quick to dismiss as too populist, too ghetto, too "identitarian," or too contradictory. In this regard much has been said about Junot's community activism. After graduating from Cornell, Díaz became actively involved with ProLibertad, in support of Puerto Rican political prisoners, the Dominican Workers Party, and organizations like the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) and the Asian American Writers Workshops, which paved the way for his work with Dominicans 2000, the grassroots group behind the first national conference for the Dominican diaspora. However, less is known about his involvement in the more contradictory realm of Latino/a electoral politics that grew out of this same community activism. In fact, Dominicans 2000 launched the political career of Ydanis Rodriguez, the first Dominican candidate for city council for District 10, Washington Heights, in 2001 and 2003. He lost both races but was finally elected in 2009. More recently, Díaz endorsed the Dominican and Latino candidates Angel Tavera, who ran in Rhode Island's gubernatorial race (defeated), and Dennis Benzan, the first Latino elected to Cambridge City Council and the first Latino vice mayor. Díaz is not blind to the limits of institutional politics as a realm for representation and progressive change, but the choice to remain "above politics" has never been an option whenever there is an opportunity to bring about incremental change. This to me is a valuable lesson of Junot's activism and one that often remains under the radar of his academic persona: his struggle against political paralysis. In other words, despite being fully aware of how power operates through racial and ethnic categories, Díaz does not remain paralyzed by the many theoretical contradictions and difficulties of threading spaces that may be associated with identitarian politics. Díaz's Latino/a movimiento involves rescuing the political imaginaries contained in grassroots politics, but also the real, material alternatives that can be embodied by progressive choices.

In East Harlem, Díaz has been a vehement supporter of La Casa Azul Bookstore, the first independent Latino/a bookstore in this community and the city's only Latino/a bookstore, which opened in 2012. Casa Azul has become a catalyst for Latino/a writers, artists, visitors, and residents to meet and to learn about each others' work, providing the type of social, artistic, and community platform that is rare to find within mainstream literary and artistic circuits. Artists, scholars, and activists do not strive in isolation; we are nurtured by each other's work, and Díaz has never lost sight of the importance of forging spaces where Latino/a scholars and activists of color can overcome their isolation and reach out into a larger community of stakeholders who would otherwise remain ignorant of each other's work or become lost in the majority-white spaces in which many of us work or have to maneuver. The Junot Díaz I know craves these spaces, both the ones that are socially and temporarily created through Latino/a specific events, as well as the ones that are more physically grounded in place, such as the community of Washington Heights or La Casa Azul Bookstore.

In other words, Díaz's cultural politics revolve around the assertion and reevaluation of a progressive anti-marketable Latinidad that challenges the whitening impulse of most mainstream Latino pundits and marketers. Foremost, his reevaluation of Latinidad is forged in direct response, and as a challenge to the dominant, Eurocentric, evaluative structures and ideologies that he and many people of color grow up with and that are constantly honed by dominant institutions and the media. He described the reaction of some upper-class Dominican kids traveling as tourists that visiting or dwelling in a primarily Dominican space like Washington Heights, or any Latino-specific space or event, represents the "equivalent of sticking their feet into a pile of mojon [pile of shit]." Díaz recalls, "I grew up with that same ideology in the air: that all things Latino were bad, that all things Dominican were bad, and that the farther away from Dominicanness you could get the better. Dominicanness in my mind was directly connected to the Dominican community in the States and even Santo Domingo, which was predominantly poor and of color and in their mind predominantly backward. And I grew up with such an avalanche ideology, this constant drumbeat like a cacophony that never went away."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination by Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Acknowledgments vii

Editors' Introduction. Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination: From Island to Empire / Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José David Saldívar 1

Part I. Activist Aesthetics

1. Against the "Discursive Latino": On the Politics and Praxis of Junot Díaz's Latinidad / Arlene Dávila 33

2. The Decolonizer's Guide to Disability / Julie Avril Minich 49

3. Laughing through a Broken Mouth in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao / Lyn Di Iorio 69

4. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cannibalist: Reading Yunior (Writing) in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao / Monica Hanna 89

Part II. Mapping Literary Geographies

5. Artistry, Ancestry, and Americanness in the Works of Junot Díaz / Silvio Torres-Saillant 115

6. This Is How You Lose it: Navigating Dominicanidad in Junot Díaz's Drown / Ylce Irizarry 147

7. Latino/a Deracination and the New Latin American Novel / Claudia Milian 173

8. Dictating a Zafa: The Power of Narrative Form as Ruin-Reading / Jennifer Harford Vargas 201

Part III. Doing Race in Spanglish

9. Dismantling the Master's House: The Decolonial Literary Imaginations of Audre Lorde and Junot Díaz / Paula M. L. Moya 231

10. Now Check It: Junot Díaz's Wondrous Spanglish / Glenda R. Carpio 257

11. A Planetary Warning?: The Multilayered Caribbean Zombie in "Monstro" / Sarah Quesada 291

Part IV. Desiring Decolonization

12. Junot Díaz's Search for Decolonial Aesthetics and Love / José David Saldívar 321

13. Sucia Love: Losing, Lying, and Leaving in Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her / Deborah R. Vargas 351

14. "Christe Apocalyptus": Prospero in the Caribbean and the Art of Power / Ramón Saldívar 377

15. The Search for Decolonial Love: A Conversation between Junot Díaz and Paula M. L. Moya 391

Bibliography 403

Contributors 425

Index 431

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