The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, and the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.Footnote 1
I Introduction
I recognize that the title of this essay is more commonly used in the context of the relationship between Mexico and the United States. There is always the other side for someone whose social role is the alien. It is easy to envision Junot Díaz, in his youth, scuttling around northern New Jersey, reading Tolkien and imagining a fantasy world. Without wanting to push the conceit, I will suggest that el otro lado also represents the view from New Jersey. Across the river, New York beckoned, but the other side also refers to the divided Island Díaz is from and the brutal history of the extermination of the Taínos, the colonial foundation of the Dominican Republic, and its complex relationship to race, but especially to blackness.Footnote 2
Some celebrate Hispaniola as the site of Columbus’s landing and the place where modern history began.Footnote 3 The Island is only one of two in the Caribbean cleaved into two sovereigns.Footnote 4 The Island is also home to the first successful slave revolt in the Americas and marks a postcolonial turn despite its complications.Footnote 5 Thus, the Dominican Republic has a tumultuous but significant place in the history of the Americas, even if most Americans (and by that, I mean people from the United States) know little about the Island’s history and have largely forgotten our invasion and occupation under LBJ.Footnote 6
Layered on top of this complex historical foundation are the experiences of an immigrant, still on the periphery, still watching his reflection in the eyes of those who would judge him, including his fellow Dominicans and the other Latinx communities he encounters. That Oscar and Junot retreat to literal and figurative closets to escape into fantasy marks them out as agents, not fugitives. I suppose it is too much to suggest that Saint Dominic, the patron saint of astronomers, would guide Díaz into science fiction and fantasy. Professor José David Saldívar, in his discussion of Junot Díaz, also produces galaxies of shooting stars, each insight into Díaz’s work lighting the horizon and permitting us to see where Junot is taking us.
In this short essay, I will discuss how history marks the Dominican story, determines (and occasionally over-determines) Yunior’s choices, and describes the characters’ ethical universe. The ethos often disappears into the background and is not always visible to the actors. This ethical dimension is always present, yet it does not require explanation, even as it justifies actions and the reasons that explain them. Let me give you an example from the law. Professor Philip Bobbitt explains in his book Constitutional Fate that law is constructed from our shared values. Of all the various techniques that courts use to decide constitutional cases, there is
a class of arguments that I call ethical arguments [that rely] on a characterization of American institutions and the role within them of the American people. It is the character, or ethos, of the American polity that is advanced in ethical arguments as the source from which particular decisions derive.Footnote 7
While I will not explain legal decisions, I will also focus on what Bobbitt calls ethical arguments in the sense that he means it: ethos. This part relates directly to who we think we are as people, and it need not be explained by legal argument, or sometimes cannot be. Formal arguments are unnecessary, perhaps even superfluous. What is the ethos that Díaz is exploring? I will propose some provisional answers.
First, a word about how I dropped into the world that Díaz created: Ten years ago, in 2014, when he was at Cornell to deliver an endowed lecture, I fell into a deep conversation with my friend José David Saldívar. As was usually the case, our discussion concerned what can be called literature from the periphery. José was excited about Junot Díaz, and his enthusiasm led me to read the entire body of Díaz’s work. It spoke to me on several levels, one of the most arresting being the expression of the multiple experiences of the Latinx diaspora. The remainder of this essay will explain why and how I think grasping the ethos Díaz describes is essential for understanding the current moment in American life and the themes in Latinx literature. Approaching this problem, one is troubled by the realization that what Díaz describes is the ethos arising out of the problem of the untranslatable. His diction reflects the collision of cultures and the birth of a new place that reframes what is at stake. This decolonial space is where Díaz’s ethos can be found.
This essay will proceed as follows. I begin by discussing the meaning of the Latinx diaspora in Díaz and how that reveals the narrative of emotional and physical displacement, exile, and alienation. I then explore the question of coloniality. I use the work of two Mexican American writers to compare different versions of the diasporic imagination and to examine how coloniality shapes their understanding of reality. Díaz’s conception of decolonial love will permit us to see the limits of resistance to colonialism. Finally, I conclude by suggesting that behind Díaz’s art is what I call “the carnality of knowledge.”
II The Latinx diaspora
A Various expressions of displacement
When contemplating the diaspora in relation to the Latinx community in the United States, I was struck by the different ways the various national identities that combine under that term experience displacement. Diaspora traditionally refers to a dispersion or scattering of people from their homeland or place of origin. Yet, even within the largest component of the Latinx community, Mexican Americans, the idea of exile or displacement, in some cases, does not make any sense. For many, there is no feeling of being forced from a homeland; instead, there is a literal reconfiguration of the map that becomes a psychological and ideological tool to mark some as “the other.” The status of being displaced is, in that sense, ascribed. The constant renewal of mother cultures through waves of immigration adds a distinct temporal element to the diasporic idea. These elements are present in Díaz’s work.
The term diaspora commonly refers to communities displaced or dispersed from their ancestral homelands due to war, colonization, or other historical conflicts. Economic and climate migration are also causes, though expanding the term to encompass those populations is fraught with disagreement and ideological resistance.
Religious conflict has been a major cause of population shifts, as is evident in the creation of Pakistan or Israel, for example. The Code Noir of 1685, which excluded all Jews from the colonies, as well as the requirement that enslaved people be baptized as Catholics and that ownership of enslaved people be limited to Catholics, is an example of the elevation of religion as a test for belonging, even as it marked out religion as a colonial tool of control. Of course, this means control over resources and people, not just the occupation of cultural space.
Political exiles or refugees forced to flee their homelands or risk persecution fall into the category encompassed within the idea of a diaspora. But it is crucial to interrogate the use of the term and not permit it to obscure real differences between and within those communities that might be said to be similarly situated in relation to the country within which they are residing. The strength of remaining ties to imagined homelands and the imaginary confected for that purpose is always problematic for the characters in Díaz’s work, especially in the conflicts between them. While it would be out of place in the mouths of his characters, the content of the epithet “pocho” would not.
When Saldívar invokes the Odyssey, especially the character of Telemachus, he is, of course, telling us to focus on Díaz’s use of displacement and dispersion, and on the continued importance of connections to a shared homeland or identity that mark insiders and outsiders from the perspective of the already marginalized characters.
Of course, Telemachus is on a journey that reveals his internal growth and the search for his father. Is Papi in Nueva York? In Ithaca? What identity is revealed in the telling of the how and the why of Oscar’s murder? Is Oscar the seeker or Yunior? Who is it that moved from the acted-upon to the actor? Is the Island real or imagined? Has the Island become personified in some women pursued in the stories or the novel, like Maria (Cuba), the lost love of the Mambo Kings? Footnote 8
As in that novel, the quest for a love beyond reach proved fatal. So, too, with Oscar. And what of Yunior? The hybrid identity suggests a place in the world, but Oscar’s loyalty and devotion call into question the notion of belonging. Without knowing whether the cane fields or London Terrace is the killing ground, or whether his fantasy is the source of life or death, the struggle to understand his place in the world creates a place that would not have existed but for his struggle. Díaz, through his characters, makes a third place. This third place is both material and figurative, almost fantastic. Its creation arises from a deep sense of duty and love, which is also the ground from which fascination with science fiction grows.
If Telemachus is a clue, it is only because the ethos of a black optimism in the characters is a rejection of defeat, and in a move not usually associated with Latinx cultures, a rejection of fatalism in the face of courage, loyalty, and pursuit of causes that never seem lost from the eyes of the pursuer, even as they seem evidence of mania.
B Exile and searching
So far, I have suggested that the diasporic idea requires displacement, but displacement is the impetus for the search that can redeem the exile. Díaz’s work maps the emotional and psychological content of the translation that is occasioned by the necessity of navigating a place that you want to claim but from which you are estranged.
Of course, the migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States is the first jarring break in cultural continuity that underlies the strangled feeling of belonging, creating a kind of double alienation. In Díaz’s collection Drown, Yunior and the characters around him form a community that offers the illusion of solidity but is, ironically, held together by the detritus of a declining industrial economy that, in reality, excludes them. Of course, as I discuss later, the circumstances in the D.R. that precipitated the move that culminated in New Jersey are the same that made London Terrace affordable. The long reach of colonialism moved players around the board when they thought they were acting of their own volition or in response to local circumstances. Their internal life is as much a part of their colonial condition as is their material life.
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar de León’s family history is marked by exile, beginning with the horror of life under the Dictator. Oscar’s mother’s trauma at the hands of the Trujillo dictatorship was alive in Oscar. The monster occupied the imagination of the nation even as it reflected external imperatives and imposed the racial imaginary of the black codes. These recur in This Is How You Lose Her or in the untranslatable meaning of sucios as it applies to women. In many ways, it captures the impossibility of assimilating into the culture that has enveloped them and of reconciling with the culture they have left. This third place is the psychological and cultural reality Díaz describes.
The idea of return, which is integral to the search for identity, is fraught because any reconnection will be to a place different from the one they left, and thus, there will be a dual process of assimilation. Hybridity comes from what is grafted on the roots. There is no secure, authentic place of repose. Díaz mines this tension and relief; for the characters, only fantasy or fabulism provides it. For Díaz, what is the storyteller but a fabulist? Or, as Chief Bromden said in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”Footnote 9
The corrosive quality of nostalgia is fully displayed in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Oscar is ill-prepared for the brutal reality of the Island and his place in it by his idealized memories. Unlike those who never left, the truth is that Oscar occupies complex dual identities, and his consciousness and unconsciousness of the conflict they produce is the feedstock of his fragmented imaginative life.
The frequent shifts between the Dominican Republic and the United States illustrate the enduring impact of the family’s past. The wounds caused by the Dictator penetrate time and the psyche of those subject to Trujillo’s whims. Oscar’s attempt to impose his agency on events is part of his effort to redeem his family’s history and validate his identity.
In This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior’s reflections on his relationships and the cultural baggage they entail lead him to reflect on his connection to the D.R., but his failure to reconcile the cultural duality of his experiences limits his insight into that relationship. The hybridity of the untethered exile makes Yunior a stranger in his own skin. There is a link between his experience and the broader historical experience of the D.R. that is stamped in his family history.
The historical linkage is especially evident in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where the horror of the Trujillo regime looms like a shadow or even a sorcerer’s spell over the minds of the living, especially those who thought they could escape by leaving. The cyclical nature of exile and return in the family’s history illustrates how the impact of political oppression and its resultant displacement is never far away. Díaz uses the themes of exile and return to illuminate and contextualize his characters’ experiences and, through that, to show each character’s limited line of sight.
III Coloniality
As I suggested earlier, colonialism’s impact is evident in Trujillo’s cruelty and in Patterson’s material conditions of life. As noted by a previous Paterson writer, “no ideas, but in things,”Footnote 10 the idea of coloniality is expressed by Díaz through his concrete recreation of life in the D.R. and New Jersey. The juxtaposition of the salient elements of life in both places is critical in exploring the impact of colonialism on the objects of the colonial enterprise, even down to the size of rooms or the toxic smells from the dump.
Junot Díaz has pointed to the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano as the source of the concept of coloniality. Abstractly stated, coloniality refers to the enduring and pervasive effects of colonialism on societies, cultures, economies, and knowledge systems, even after the formal end of colonial rule. As Marx famously put it:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.Footnote 11
The social life Díaz constructs captures the ways the nightmare of colonialism distorts human relationships. Whether in This is How You Lose Her or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior’s understanding of what he is doing and his failure to grasp the motivations driving Oscar reflect how colonial legacies continue to shape social relations, power dynamics, and modes of knowledge production in both colonizing and colonized societies. The character of the Dictator locates the transfer of colonizing power from Spain to the United States. Thus, the shape of coloniality in the lives of Díaz’s characters reflects transnational and transcultural distortions produced by the gravitational pull of historical events.
Structural inequality based on race, ethnicity, culture, and economic status is emblematic of colonialism. These hierarchies bring with them political and economic domination and the imposition of cultural norms, values, and ideologies of the colonizers. Where indigenous populations could not be extirpated, they were marginalized in colonized societies, and their cultures and languages were debased. This social degradation was magnified in slave societies, and it defined a kind of caste as well as a class for those of mixed blood and stood in relief to the purity of the colonizer.
This system was the material expression of the colonial power’s epistemic domination. Coloniality produced systems of knowledge production, with colonial powers often imposing their epistemologies and worldviews as the standard. Indigenous ways of knowing were dismissed, repressed, or characterized as generally inferior and the province of superstition and myth.
I would argue that one of the things that marks Díaz’s work as wholly distinct from his contemporaries in the program era is that his characters’ motivations arose from the colonial space. It is as if the world they inhabited intersected with another one that operated synchronously in a different plane. It seems to be no accident that Díaz’s imagination often took a turn toward science fiction.
A The coloniality of power/knowledge
Colonialism was a world-building project. Its legacy is more than the physical domination of territories and peoples; it entailed the imposition of Eurocentric ideologies, worldviews, and epistemologies. These ideologies assumed as much as justified colonial rule and white superiority. I recognize that phrasing it that way is anachronistic since, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò suggested that a global racial empire that depended on slavery needed to create the ideology of race.Footnote 12 Creating racial categories is part of the coloniality of knowledge, with enduring material impacts.
The epistemic hierarchy of knowledge systems, in which European knowledge, including Christianity, was understood to be superior to that of colonized peoples, imposed a political order. Importantly, this understanding is embedded in academic disciplines, scientific methodologies, and cultural narratives.Footnote 13 Its embeddedness makes its reproduction invisible until works like Díaz’s pull back the curtain.
With epistemic hierarchy comes violence. The marginalization and suppression of Indigenous, African, Asian, and other non-Western ways of knowing were accomplished with the blade, with the lash, and with death. Díaz captures the epigenetic expression of that violence. The persistence of epistemic power is what Oscar and the others experience.
The coloniality of knowledge is shorthand for the role of power in the production of knowledge. This process’s epistemological and ideological content creates the following problem for those subject to its pressure: Those who resist the dominant ideology and the intimate connection between colonialism and knowledge production often end up in jail, while those who resist the dominant epistemology end up in insane asylums.
These structures of domination are part of colonial power’s hegemony even in postcolonial societies. The coloniality of power is the persistence of colonial forms of domination that are naturalized into postcolonial societies. This persistence persists even in societies like the United States that do not consider themselves colonial powers.Footnote 14 Díaz’s work reveals the fiction of that conception. The colonial power exercised by the United States is expressed through the political culture maintained by Trujillo, and the brutal exercise of power by the Dictator is crucial for understanding the characters’ motivations, especially in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Because colonialism is a world-building exercise, there is no escaping its power. The order that European colonialism and later the United States imposed on the world positioned Europe and the West as superior to the colonized people, who were structurally understood as the “Other” even in their own land. Díaz mines this tension by having his characters move back and forth between the United States and the DR. They turn out to be almost equally estranged from both places.
Yet, the power of Díaz’s stories lies in the fact that the challenge to the dominance of coloniality is itself a world-building enterprise. However, the resources, material and cultural, necessary for this project are not distributed equally, and the inequality is naturalized as the reason for the colonized’s condition. Who can forget the import of the questions about whether this or that group is capable of self-governance?
B Anzaldúa
In the following two sections, I want to compare Díaz’s world-building with that of two other Latinx writers. I want to explore where Latin coloniality produces cognate responses, especially the distinctive responses to the transference of Latin colonialism to the coloniality of US power. I will start by mapping the connections between Gloria Anzaldúa’s and Junot Díaz’s works.
In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa introduces the concept of the borderlands as a physical, spiritual, and metaphorical space where cultures and identities intersect, collide, and create something new. The syncretism is contained in the identity of the new mestiza, but it is not just a new identity; it is a place to understand the world. The borderlands are also a third place where the amalgam of cultures, histories, and languages vividly contrasts with the broader colonialized Southwest. Anzaldúa rejects the conventional categories within which she is customarily boxed.
Junot Díaz’s work, notably The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, also explores hybridity and the consequences of cultural collisions. His characters often navigate the space between their Dominican and American lives. What identity do they claim as their own? While not explicitly engaging the idea of borderlands, his characters nonetheless exist between two, and possibly three, worlds as they deal with issues of assimilation, the fluid definition of D.R. culture, and the identity conflicts that such confrontation produces. They contain the borderlands.
The most marked similarity is the linguistic dynamism of both Díaz and Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands uses multiple languages and dialects, mixing English, Spanish, and indigenous languages, creating a text that embodies her hybridity. She uses these languages as a portal to the historical roots of the borderlands. Her work permits her to access the mythology that grows like a vine through the ruins of the civilization crushed by the Spanish. Similarly, Díaz uses Dominican-inflected Spanglish and slang to capture the linguistic reality his characters inhabit. This language authenticates his characters’ voices and emphasizes the hybridity of their cultural identities. They have the vitality of the new, whereas Anzaldúa uses the past to validate contemporary uses.
Anzaldúa’s construction of “mestiza consciousness” is an expression of and resistance to the coloniality of the borderlands. This mestiza identity refuses to privilege any conception of race, gender, sexuality, and culture that does not begin with the mestiza as the subject. She explores how these overlapping identities create unique experiences of both marginalization and empowerment. Díaz does not explicitly use the idea of the mestizaje or mestiza/o consciousness. Still, his characters embody a Caribbean version of intersectionality through the complexities of their experiences as immigrants dealing with issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Blackness is a protean category, and its lack of fixedness is emblematic of racial hierarchies born on the Island. Similarly, his women characters are compelled to navigate both Dominican and American expressions of patriarchal power.
Anzaldúa’s work is often viewed as being deeply rooted in the idea of resistance. Her work is valorized not only because it signals the existence of a place of resistance but also because resistance to oppressive structures and the empowerment of marginalized identities are integral to meaning. Reading Díaz’s narratives as sites of resistance and resilience is crucial. His characters confront and challenge dominant norms of sexual identities and resist cultural assimilation even as they try to defy traditional gender roles. Of course, Yunior’s relationships with women are sometimes a grotesque parody of Latinx masculinity, and Oscar’s are largely pathetic.
Perhaps, the place where they overlap most directly is in their confrontation with trauma and the struggle for healing. Díaz explores the traumatic experiences of his characters, whether from the impact of the Dictator in the D.R. or from the personal traumas arising from the need to migrate and the effects of those decisions on family dynamics. The need to belong somewhere is rooted in trauma and healing. Both Anzaldúa and Díaz address themes of identity, resistance, and empowerment. Each provides a rich, nuanced portrayal of the colonial experience and the complexities of living between cultures. While their specific focuses and methods differ, the thematic connections between their explorations of hybridity, language, intersectionality, and resistance significantly confirm coloniality’s continued expression in daily life.
C Anaya
The transgressive nature of Anzaldúa’s work makes the comparison to Díaz plain. Both challenge genres and stand outside conventional narrative forms. They also yield examples of coloniality’s impact on different Latinx communities. Despite the more traditional narrative style of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, I want to suggest that there are reasons to read them together. Their work explores the issues of hybridity, masculinity, family, exile, and return. They both use the coming-of-age conceit.
In an immigrant setting, cultural identity must come to terms with the impact of being an outsider and the consequent hybridity that results. As Bless Me, Ultima shows, this is true even when the protagonist is not an immigrant but is cast into that status through settler colonialism. You are made to feel like an outsider in your own home. Anzaldúa documented that process, although hers was a series of multiple estrangements that ultimately compelled the centering of her experience. Anaya self-consciously centers the Chicano point of view and, by doing so, opens the door to complex elements of Chicanismo. It is also a New Mexican novel, with the complicated history of Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo colonialism that its setting entails.
Just as the Island permits the characters in Díaz’s work to explore the roots of D.R. identity, in Bless Me, Ultima, the protagonist Antonio Márez navigates his coming-of-age with the ministrations of a curandera and through her access to indigenous knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Yet, his use of this knowledge puts him at odds with the Spanish content of his Mexican identity by valorizing its indigenous component. It is also contrary to that most potent source of colonial knowledge/power, the Catholic Church. Díaz similarly explores cultural identity and hybridity in his characters, particularly in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Drown. The Island has a gravitational pull that distorts memory and confounds cultural expectations, even as they struggle to understand the terms of assimilating into American society.
Many of these expectations are most clearly in view when Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima and Yunior in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her struggle to reconcile traditional notions of machismo with their personal vulnerabilities. The various models of masculinity and masculine expression do not fit Yunior or Antonio. The disjunction between conventional conceptions of masculinity and the characters’ experiences is captured in depictions of relationships with fathers, brothers, and other male figures in their community.
Perhaps because of Márquez, the use of magical realism or the resort to the supernatural is often seen as a marker of Latinx fiction. Indeed, Anzaldúa’s work invokes that trope, but so does Anaya. Ultima possesses mystical abilities, and supernatural events play a central role in the narrative. The character of the curandera, sometimes characterized as a bruja, is critical to the spiritual aspects of Antonio’s world. While Díaz’s use of magical realism is less overt, he does employ elements of myth and the supernatural, particularly in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, where references to Dominican folklore, curses, and supernatural events blend with the historical and contemporary realities of his characters. The references to the ineffable in these books gesture to an older, more authentic tradition and function as resistance to the hegemony of the coloniality of knowledge.
Rudolfo Anaya and Junot Díaz can be read as explorations of the complexities of cultural identity through the coming-of-age experience in colonial space. The interplay of tradition and modernity in the work of Anaya and Díaz is as different as you might expect, given the material conditions within which the various works arise. The postindustrial coloniality of New Jersey is radically different from that of the rural, pre-industrial, peripheral towns in New Mexico. The presence of indigenous people whose past is not gone is also fundamentally different from the virtual extermination of the Tainos. Just as Hispaniola was the site of the first successful slave revolt, New Mexico was the site of the first successful expulsion of the Spanish from the territory they claimed. Though it lasted only a generation, it remains as fixed a part of that particular imaginary as the figure of the Dictator does to the Dominican exiles. While their narrative styles and specific cultural contexts are jarringly different, the thematic parallels in their explorations of family, community, and self and the continual eruption of the past into the present resonate and reveal the heterogeneous expressions of colonialism in the Latinx diaspora.
D Decolonial love
By bringing those three writers together, I also hoped to reveal the roots of resistance that could blossom into the ultimate act of resistance: decolonial love. Although decolonial love is associated with Junot Díaz, I want to suggest that it is a necessary component of modern Latinx literature.
What does Díaz mean by decolonial love, and can that meaning be found in Anzaldúa or Anaya? One of the difficulties is marking out a baseline. Where can decolonial expressions arise from the pervasiveness of colonial legacies, as captured in the concept of coloniality? The idea of decolonialism is often associated with postcolonialism, but its etiology is distinct, although related. To be decolonized means more than shifting the recognized sources of legitimate power.
The essence of decolonial love lies in resisting the colonial legacies that have shaped relationships, identities, and societal norms. Resistance includes rejecting received standards of beauty and gender roles and embracing alternative, more authentic expressions of love and intimacy. But Yunior is constantly tempted by the accepted standards. The path Díaz maps through the love lives, perhaps, especially in the unrequited loves of his characters, involves centering marginalized voices and experiences to reveal the agency and humanity of those people. The detritus of colonialism can make them authors of their own lives, even if that capacity is limited. Solidarity is the space where decolonial love can take root.
It is also the place where healing from colonialism’s traumas can begin by reclaiming agency and autonomy over one’s own identity and future. Decolonial love means seeing the culture you inhabit, the language you create, and the history you dispute as sources of strength and resilience rather than shame or inferiority.
Another essential feature of decolonial love is that it changes the imaginary and permits those within its ambit to see what a future without the constraints of colonialism would look like. Even in fleeting glimpses, it is revolutionary to this extent because it exposes the state of things as they are and shows it to be intolerable.
IV The carnality of knowledge
How does this figure as a form and source of resistance to coloniality? By carnality, I mean the physicality (through all the senses) but mainly the sexual aspects of social life and the material conditions within which that life is constructed. While his characters spend a lot of time in their heads, the grounding materiality of their life jerks them out of whatever fabulist reverie they might be entertaining. Reading Junot Díaz’s work, I was reminded of the humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan shows how spaces become places in a series of books, especially Space and Place and Landscapes of Fear. Critical to that transformation is the experience as an agent to recreate the cultural context within which identity is constructed. Importantly, asserting your own language to describe and negotiate the space and to own it by assimilating it into your imagination is also key. This process also makes a space a safe place. Fear can be kept at bay, and the naturalization of the hybridized language is part of making the place less alienating.
Carnality figures prominently in the movement of his characters through the world. Sexual desire and performance, or desired performance, are linked to both masculine definition and self-worth. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior’s and Oscar’s sexual experiences and attendant frustrations figure in how they think of themselves and are essential elements in their identities. A kind of parody of Dominican masculinity drives Yunior’s promiscuity and Oscar’s lack of sexual experience.
Díaz portrays how cultural pressures shape sexual behavior and relationships, and he uses carnality to critique societal norms and cultural expectations of both the dominant Anglo culture and the received or conventional Dominican expressions. The thin idea of machismo reflected in hypersexuality colors all the relationships as Yunior and Oscar attempt to escape their youth and other material limitations that keep them trapped.
Sexuality and immigrant status are among the defining features of the characters in Díaz’s work. In Drown, the stories depict young Dominican immigrants in the United States grappling with desire amid poverty, racism, and cultural dislocation. Díaz uses carnality to express how power circulates within relationships, and sexual encounters reveal issues of control, dominance, and vulnerability. Infidelity and sexual conquest in This How You Lose Her expose the fragility of relationships and the impact of betrayal and loss and reveal the continuing defensiveness in Yunior’s social interactions. But in some ways, the fragility is built into the coloniality that maps their relations. The carnality reveals how the pervasiveness of colonial history continues to distort every kind of human relation. Sexual experiences are pivotal in Díaz’s narratives for character self-discovery and development. Through their carnal encounters, Díaz’s characters reveal their fears and how that fear is part of their desires.
The language confected from Dominican slang, Spanish, and English is carnal and freighted with class positions. His characters’ raw, visceral intensity expresses authenticity, like their language. Truth is part of the carnality that works like a solvent to loosen the psychological constraints of the colonial inheritance.
V Conclusion
What is the ethos of the world Díaz creates? What is the emerging normative vision summarized in “decolonial love”? The impact of coloniality is expressed in Negocios, This Is How You Lose Her, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and it dominates the structure of relationships among male characters, especially between male and female characters, and across generations. Yet, even in these fraught relationships, the seeds of resistance are planted (even leading to Oscar’s death), and the stranglehold of colonial legacies gives way to the reclamation of agency. This process is found in Anzaldúa and Anaya, but the expressions of coloniality are as distinct as the cultural foundations in Anzaldúa, Anaya, or Díaz. Of course, resistance to domination is at the heart of each Latinx cultural expression, and the material conditions under which those cultures emerge are critical.
What is important to remember, and perhaps what makes the idea of the “carnality of knowledge” critical, is that it reminds us that colonialism in the first place and the coloniality of power and knowledge postcolonialism are material enterprises before they are cultural projects. Decolonialism is a step beyond postcolonialism because it questions the domestic traces of colonial power.Footnote 15 Resistance takes the form of rejecting continued colonial rule in the mother country, which is why the Dictator and subsequent governments must be opposed. The immediate reasons for opposition are the cruelty through which the Island is governed and the continued expression of colonial power through the person of the Dictator. Marx noted the process through which this occurs:
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.Footnote 16
In the immediate postcolonial period, this process is reproduced almost uniformly because colonialism produced a hegemony of authority.
Keeping the materiality of colonial history and its effects in mind is crucial for understanding the class and epistemic realities that the characters Díaz constructs. Díaz does more than valorize the marginalized position of his protagonists; he centralizes and problematizes it. What do London Terrace and Santo Domingo have in common? For Yunior and Oscar, viewed from the perspective of their class position, they occupy precarious economic circumstances in each place, even if they feel more culturally embedded and alienated on the Island. The precarious nature of their economic and political positions feels different in the United States, and in the D.R., their racial position is also fluid.
By mapping those differences, Díaz emphasizes the emerging agency and humanity of Yunior, Oscar, and even the “sucias,” who are the objects of Yunior’s predation and the source of his occasional comeuppance. Decolonial love starts in carnality, but it transcends the simple-minded sexual pursuit by converting that pursuit into rehearsals of historic traumas and places where healing can begin. But nothing is happening just in their heads. The world is remade through escape; thus, even exile becomes a site of creation. The elaboration of the cultural transitions demanded of the immigrant demonstrates the materiality of culture. This brute fact is also where transcendence can be found, the future can be constructed, and the lingering debris of colonialism can finally be thrown off.
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