The Excesses of Genre Fiction, History, and Voice in Oscar Wao

• In Event: Intertexuality, Identity-Formation, and Literary Engagements between Latina/os and Latin Americans

Abstract

In this paper, I study how science fiction, history, and the English-Spanish vernacular particular to Dominican Americans in the northeastern United States generate a Latino narrative in Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) that reconfigures its genealogical intertexts in order to represent the nuanced experience of 21st century Dominican diaspora. At least since the 1980s, this diaspora, despite migratory obstacles for unfettered movement between the United States and the Dominican Republic, has functioned as a recursive circuit of comings and goings, as opposed to one-way travel, for Dominicans and Dominican Americans. While the novel provides ample evidence of this phenomenon, I argue that movement as norm rather than exception is sustained by the literary usage of genre fiction, history, and voice. If the space of the novel is neither New Jersey nor Santo Domingo but rather New Jersey-Santo Domingo, science fiction and fantasy, the retelling of history, and the deployment of a literary Dominican American voice create a contentious signifying field that is not a problem that requires a solution or correction. As opposed to earlier Caribbean novels that stage either a desire or an apprehension to exchange one (national, linguistic, etc.) identity for another, Oscar Wao imagines a world where the trauma of the Dominican immigrant past must be integrated in order to generate a future project rather than be lamented. Indeed, integrating the recursive negotiations represented as endemic to the Dominican diaspora seem to be a precondition for transcending a networked, globalized world.

Author

• Javier Jiménez, Marietta College