In Junot Diaz: On the Half-Life of Love, Jose David Saldivar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Diaz'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. Saldivar examines several aspects of Diaz'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 Americas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldivar shows how Diaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.

The first sustained critical examination of the work of Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz, this interdisciplinary collection considers how Diaz's writing illuminates the world of Latino cultural expression and trans-American and diasporic literary history. Interested in conceptualizing Diaz's decolonial imagination and his radically re-envisioned world, the contributors show how his aesthetic and activist practice reflect a significant shift in American letters toward a hemispheric and planetary culture. They examine the intersections of race, Afro-Latinidad, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, and power in Diaz's work. Essays in the volume explore issues of narration, language, and humor in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the racialized constructions of gender and sexuality in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and the role of the zombie in the short story "Monstro." Collectively, they situate Diaz's writing in relation to American and Latin American literary practices and reveal the author's activist investments. The volume concludes with Paula Moya's interview with Diaz. Contributors: Glenda R. Carpio, Arlene Davila, Lyn Di Iorio, Junot Diaz, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Ylce Irizarry, Claudia Milian, Julie Avril Minich, Paula M. L. Moya, Sarah Quesada, Jose David Saldivar, Ramon Saldivar, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Deborah R. Vargas

The first sustained critical examination of the work of Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz, this interdisciplinary collection considers how Diaz's writing illuminates the world of Latino cultural expression and trans-American and diasporic literary history. Interested in conceptualizing Diaz's decolonial imagination and his radically re-envisioned world, the contributors show how his aesthetic and activist practice reflect a significant shift in American letters toward a hemispheric and planetary culture. They examine the intersections of race, Afro-Latinidad, gender, sexuality, disability, poverty, and power in Diaz's work. Essays in the volume explore issues of narration, language, and humor in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the racialized constructions of gender and sexuality in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and the role of the zombie in the short story "Monstro." Collectively, they situate Diaz's writing in relation to American and Latin American literary practices and reveal the author's activist investments. The volume concludes with Paula Moya's interview with Diaz. Contributors: Glenda R. Carpio, Arlene Davila, Lyn Di Iorio, Junot Diaz, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Ylce Irizarry, Claudia Milian, Julie Avril Minich, Paula M. L. Moya, Sarah Quesada, Jose David Saldivar, Ramon Saldivar, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Deborah R. Vargas

Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and Euro-latinos), multi-ethnic, multireligious (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, indigenous, and African spiritualities), and of varied legal status (immigrants, citizens, and illegal migrants). This collection addresses for the first time the potential of these diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and statuses against the landscape of decolonization of the U.S. economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. Some authors explore the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States and others discuss the conflicting interpretations and political conflicts arising from the "Latinization" of the United States.

In Junot Diaz: On the Half-Life of Love, Jose David Saldivar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores Diaz'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. Saldivar examines several aspects of Diaz'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 Americas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, Saldivar shows how Diaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.

Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and Euro-latinos), multi-ethnic, multireligious (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, indigenous, and African spiritualities), and of varied legal status (immigrants, citizens, and illegal migrants). This collection addresses for the first time the potential of these diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and statuses against the landscape of decolonization of the U.S. economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. Some authors explore the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States and others discuss the conflicting interpretations and political conflicts arising from the "Latinization" of the United States.

"A brilliant new vision of the multiple migrations, metaphoric and material, that occur within and between intricate, evolving cultures of the U.S. and Mexico. By joining British and U.S. cultural studies to the study of the U.S. borderlands, Saldivar establishes the trans-Latin as a complex and contradictory space of ethnic identity, cultural imagination and political struggle. "Border Matters is a groundbreaking book that not only casts light on regions that have been shadowed by neglect and disdain, but it also forces us to redraw, even unmap, the shifting intellectual borders of American cultural studies."--Michael Eric Dyson, "Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line

""Border Matters is exemplary in its detailed and sophisticated investigation of cultural texts. . . . A valuable work of intellectual history as well as a tour de force of contemporary cultural criticism."--George Lipsitz, author of "Time Passages

"Saldivar presents and reworks very complex issues in a manner that will make this book accessible, even inviting, to non-expert readers, yet he loses none of the edge of his argument. . . . This is a groundbreaking work that does much more than define a new field--it revolutionizes the predominant ways we tend to organize intellectual inquiry."--Carl Gutierrez-Jones, author of "Rethinking the Borderlands

Joining the current debates in American literary history, Jose David Saldivar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies.
Saldivar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldua, Arturo Islas, Ntozake Shange, and others) and Latin American authors (Jose Marti, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and others), whose work forms a radical critique of the dominant culture, its politics, and its restrictive modes of expression. By doing so, Saldivar opens the traditional American canon to a dialog with other voices, not just the voices of national minorities, but those of regional cultures different from the prevalent anglocentric model.
"The Dialectics of Our America," in its project to expand the "canon" and define a pan-American literary tradition, will make a critical difference in ongoing attempts to reconceptualize American literary history.

This pathbreaking anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a remarkable range of texts-both old and new-draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist. The editors have organized essays around four board themes: the situation of Chicano literary studies within American literary history and debates about the "canon"; representations of the Chicana/o subject; genre, ideology, and history; and the aesthetics of Chicano literature. The volume as a whole aims at generating new ways of understanding what counts as culture and "theory" and who counts as a theorist. A selected and annotated bibliography of contemporary Chicano literary criticism is also included. By recovering neglected authors and texts and introducing readers to an emergent Chicano canon, by introducing new perspectives on American literary history, ethnicity, gender, culture, and the literary process itself, Criticism in the Borderlands is an agenda-setting collection that moves beyond previous scholarship to open up the field of Chicano literary studies and to define anew what is American literature.Contributors. Norma Alarcon, Hector Calderon, Angie Chabram, Barbara Harlow, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, Jose E. Limon, Terese McKenna, Elizabeth J. Ordonez, Genero Padilla, Alvina E. Quintana, Renato Rosaldo, Jose David Saldivar, Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Rosaura Sanchez, Roberto Trujillo

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, Jose David Saldivar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and "outernational" paradigm for American studies. Saldivar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. "Americanity as a Concept," an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria Anzaldua, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saldivar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of Jose Marti, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the "unspeakable" in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, Saldivar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the Americas.