Richard Perez

Moments of magical realism in US ethnic literatures

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

Flashes of Transgression

In Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,1 the fuku names a horrific substance begotten in an alchemy of violence marking the emergence of the New World. For Diaz, this curse signifies the symbolic starting point of New World identity— “we are all its children” (2)— as it sutures a perverse history that begins in the Black Atlantic and grounds itself, among other places, in the Latin American plantation, in the subsequent twentieth-century dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, and in contemporary diasporic afterlives. The fuku, “carried” throughout the hemisphere “in the screams of the enslaved” (1), is transmogrified into an obscene inhteritance, running through the very historic and social bloodlines of the hemisphere, to shape and deform the psychic lives of its subjects. Indeed the fuku, or curse, according to Diaz, designates the foundational characteristic of the Americas and, in its violent origins, gives birth to an anti-Edenic universe and sensibility. Consequently, the curse produces an agonistic struggle between love and evil, justice and violence, that requires an imaginative intervention to translate its ineffable properties and perhaps reverse its seemingly ineluctable grasp on the New World subject. Thus the curse, instantiated by centuries of exploitation, certifies a “doom” that sits at the heart of (Latin) American existence, beyond the ken of traditional reason, in an experiental abyss where only fiction dares to tread. This essay therefore will trace the curse as Diaz imagines it, from the Dominican Republic to New York/New Jersey and back, a spiraling motion of exchange that alters, haunts, and reconstitutes Latino/a identity as seen from the exemplary lives of its two protagonists, Beli and Oscar.

Introduction New Waves in U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism

Over the last decade, U.S. Latino/a literary criticism has emerged as an innovative and invigorating theoretical presence, reflecting the similarly exciting and unprecedented literary production by Latino/a novelists, essayists, and poets. Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism brings to this milieu a series of distinguished essays demonstrating the diverse methodological trends currently at work in the field. The most immediate aim of this text is to address the literature itself: a literature that has grown progressively throughout the twentieth century, appearing after 1960 to dynamically document and reinvent Latino/a experience. A critical response must take into account rich narrative practices, which reshape, revise, and sometimes in their difference challenge Western literary traditions. Theorizing a literature that melds different languages, storytelling techniques, and memories of distant and diverse geographies is a daunting and exhilarating task.