When I first read Junot Daz, I wondered what his literature about Dominican diasporic subjects in New Jersey had that was so appealing for someone who grew up in a Southern Cone dictatorship-like myself.His stories, interwoven with humor, anger, and tenderness, portray characters that are not only aesthetically honest but also historically recognizable, at least from my experience as part of a generation that is still trying to overcome the legacies of violence locally engendered by counterinsurgency policies framed within the Cold War.I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) when I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, and, of course, the Trans-American confluences posed by Jos David Saldvar's criticism provided me with clues to understand my affinity with Diaz's characters.Interestingly, while Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Colonialities, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (2012) studies a wide range of radical literatures and cultures of the Americas in order to search for nodes of decolonial proximity among their aesthetics, Junot Daz: On the Half-Life of Love (2022) seems to delineate a different path. 1 By focusing on the personal and academic itineraries of a single writer, Saldvar seeks to expose the far-reaching decolonial roots and ramifications of each one of his works.And I believe he proves that the roots and ramifications of Junot Daz's literature can be found all over the darker sides of the geographies of the Western Hemisphere, as well as in the modern stories of its inhabitants.By means of some rhizomatic connections-or by "a set of reciprocating colonial complicities" originated in the coloniality of power and the Black Atlantic some five centuries ago-the countless unwritten sagas of people forced into exile to flee from dictatorial violence or neoliberal exclusion
Mónica González García (Mon,) studied this question.