In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, José David Saldívar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Díaz’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. Saldívar examines several aspects of Díaz’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, Saldívar shows how Díaz’s works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.

José David Saldívar is Leon Sloss Jr. Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author or coeditor of many books, including Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, both also published by Duke University Press.

Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xix
Introduction  1
1. “Wrestling with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings”: How Junot Díaz Thinks About Coloniality, Power, and the Speculative Genres  27
Part I. Junot Díaz’s MFA Program Era at Cornell University and Beyond
2. Díaz’s Planet MFA: “Negocios”  47
3. Díaz’s Planet POC (People of Color): Drown  73
Part II. Understanding Imaginary Transference and the Colonial Difference
4. Becoming Oscar “Oscar Wao”  99
Part III. A Legacy In-formation
5. Junot Díaz’s Search for Decolonial Love  151
Conclusion and Coda: “Monstro” and Islandborn  179
Notes  191
Bibliography  225
Index  239