In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Critical Regionalist Reading of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:Rethinking Magical Realism through Afro-Caribbean Oral Narrative
  • Sarah Winstein-Hibbs (bio)

Beginning with Carolyn Porter's important essay, "What We Know That We Don't Know: Remapping American Studies" (1994), American literary history for the last two and a half decades has turned toward considerations of the global and transnational. Such a shift has been generative in many ways, particularly in urging Americanists to consider alternate periodizations, literary production outside the continental United States, and interlocking hemispheric patterns of slavery, colonization, and neoliberal globalization. Paradoxically, while this shift has opened American literary studies to Caribbean literary production, the terms of this inclusion have often been globalist and comparative, sometimes eliding regional and local considerations. Sarah Phillips Casteel writes that "the Caribbean is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of the deterritorialization of culture" (624), prompting some Caribbean scholars to call for a renewed emphasis on locality, a call echoed in Latina/o studies and other American subfields.1 Yet there is no need to discount the insights and affordances of the transnational turn, for it seems that local and transnational analyses need not be at odds in American literary studies. José E. Limón calls for a methodology of "critical regionalism" in American literary studies, in which literary scholars remain "closely attentive to text and local context while linking these firmly into the global" (177). What might a critical regionalist approach reveal about Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), one of the most popular "global" novels of recent years?

Transnational and global readings of Oscar Wao have proliferated since the book's publication. Many of these readings focus on the relationship between the Dominican Republic and the United States, since this is the most-traveled route in the novel. However, the novel's depiction of pan-Caribbean regional flows of labor, bodies, and culture is much less often the subject of critical commentary. Scholars have similarly overlooked several key local and regional [End Page 24] aspects of this novel or have primarily analyzed them through globalist frameworks. The text is laced with references to oral narratives about the mongoose and the faceless man, which simultaneously cue universalist mythologies of "trickster" figures and specifically Caribbean historical and cultural circumstances (these oral narratives furnish evidence of routes, and roots, at once, to borrow Paul Gilroy's memorable phrase [19]). A locally and globally informed analysis of these oral narratives allows critics to consider the context of colonial slavery in which these stories arose and the way the novel wields them to illuminate the hidden links between plantation, dictatorship, and patterns of gendered and racial violence wrought by contemporary neoliberal globalization. Critics have expounded on Oscar Wao's citation and reuse of other written genres (comics, science fiction, fantasy, postmodern novels), and as Anne Garland Mahler rightly notes, the book is centrally preoccupied with exposing the role of the written word in "maintaining colonial relations of power" (119).2 However, with the exception of Jennifer Harford Vargas and Sam Vásquez, few critics have examined the text's use of oral sources, a key object of study in a text so deeply engaged with the life and oral-literary practices of enslaved people in the Americas.3

Given Oscar Wao's investment in portraying the Trujillo dictatorship as a neoplantation zone, closely examining the oral as a site of resistance to state power is crucial. In both the plantation and the dictatorship, orality's ephemerality (in some sense a fictive distinction, for oral tales have a long life and persist intergenerationally) is its strength.4 The physicality of an insurgent written document can incriminate the writer, whether that writer is an enslaved person who possesses forbidden textual literacy or a dissenter living under a dictatorship. While textual archives can be physically scourged, remembered oral narratives are arguably much harder to purge.5 At the same time, planters and dictators can certainly coopt and exploit the power of oral and "folk" cultural resources to enact a darker mission. How might Oscar Wao refashion localized Caribbean oral narratives and strategies, which are already products of a...

pdf

Share