Junot Díaz Saldívar

Junot Díaz

On the Half-Life of Love JOSÉ DAVID SALDÍVAR

“In Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, critic José David Saldívar argues with stunning acuity why Díaz’s oeuvre is essential in understanding how colonial histories are palimpsestic in nature, inescapable and violent, intimate and communal. Díaz’s fiction may represent one artist’s fierce intelligence and profound storytelling talents, but it is Saldívar whose richly textured analysis and readings prove that great fiction shines a light on devastating distortions of truth.”—HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES, author of Their Dogs Came with Them

“Wise, and wide ranging, José David Saldívar allows us to explore the contradictions and gifts of a major writer with grace and candor. He places Díaz’s life and fiction against the ‘historical traumas passed like cursed heirlooms among our aggrieved communities,’ and shows us ‘the everpressing need for decolonial love.’ And, as always, Saldívar remains attuned to the immigrant and diasporic sensibilities of our Americas.”—GLENDA CARPIO, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

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 Prizewinning 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 sciencefiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldívar shows how Díaz’s works exemplify the literary currents of the early twentyfirst century.

Also by José David Saldívar

Trans-Americanity Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico

Junot Díaz

On the Half-Life of Love

José David Saldívar

September 272 pages, 16 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1871-1 $26.95/£20.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1608-3 $99.95/£80.00

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.