Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz Synopsis

In Junot Dìaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldìvar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Dìaz's imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing-especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao-radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. Saldìvar examines several aspects of Dìaz's career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the Américas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldìvar shows how Dìaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.