Abstract

As he begins the story of Oscar de León’s “brief and wondrous life,” the Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz turns to the forms of the Global South’s outernational poetics of planetary coloniality and wonder, discovery and conquest. The hero’s experiences of diaspora, structures of underdevelopment, and exuberant raciology, the burden of his intellectual Creole double consciousness from inhabiting two incommensurable worlds (Santo Domingo and Paterson, New Jersey), the recurring decolonial motifs of the Great “American doom” or “curse” and of the world of the damnés which structures Oscar and Yunior’s lives are described by Díaz as the fukú americanus. In my essay, I examine Díaz’s theory of the fukú americanus and how it originated in colonial modernity with Admiral Colón and how it was then carried into the present by homegrown figures like Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina and Ronald Reagan. To chart accurately the full dimensions of Díaz’s narratological compass in the Global South, I will begin by analyzing the historical sociologists Immanuel Wallenstein and Aníbal Quijano’s attempt to recover the complexity of what they call “Americanity.” I will then illustrate the complexity of Americanity’s history and afterlife by analyzing it in relation to Díaz’s decolonial theory of the fukú americanus. My aim in this essay is to introduce the vocabulary of “Americanity” to bring about a shift in the framework and the perspective as well as the object of analysis of world-system literature and of the US Latino novel.

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