Papers by Antoinette Hertel
Modern Languages Association Convention, 2017
In this conference paper, I examine how Junot Díaz employs science fiction to explore “the conse... more In this conference paper, I examine how Junot Díaz employs science fiction to explore “the consequences of breeding people” (Díaz, Wired 2012) in “Monstro,” a narrative that is hauntingly prescient of the current crisis in the Dominican Republic with the revocation of citizenship and deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Set a futuristic, apocalyptic moment on the island of Hispaniola, the action is driven by a viral outbreak called la Negrura infecting Haitians in “relocation camps” outside of Port-au-Prince. I analyze the implications of Díaz’s shift to writing in the science fiction genre for his representations of masculinity, sexuality, and race in this text. The Dominican-American narrator informs the reader in the first lines of “Monstro” that “[t]hese days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end,” and admits that he was chasing a girl. The hyper-masculine, heteronormative performance of the narrator will be familiar to readers of Junot Díaz’s work. In his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao some characters’ interpretation of life in the Dominican diaspora is filtered through a science fiction lens, yet this nerd knowledge is repeatedly singled out by its narrator as a mark of queer Otherness and a failure to be masculine. In “Monstro,” Díaz removes this mark of difference, as the narrator and all characters inhabit the same science fictional, futuristic world. Still, the island remains “ground zero” for the apocalypse, as it was in the novel. This time, however, though the protagonist is consumed with sex, race is the determining factor for survival. In this paper, I explore how science fiction, with its historical indebtedness to colonialism, provides a tool for interpreting diasporic reality and a context for the narrator’s performance of his neocolonial, transnational inheritance of racism and sexism.
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Una genealogía del realismo mágico y del macondismo.
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Talks by Antoinette Hertel
Hofstra University -- Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Women's Studies Program, and the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures , 2018
This presentation examines how Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz employs speculative writing i... more This presentation examines how Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz employs speculative writing in his interrogation of masculinities and race, and it will reflect on the impact that recent revelations made by the author (The New Yorker, April 2018), and accusations against him by several women (May 2018), might have on scholarly readings and class discussions of this work. The hyper-masculine, heteronormative performance of the characters in his books will be familiar to readers of Junot Díaz's work. The author's speculative renderings of masculinities --monstrous and despotic, queer and other, zombie and revenant-- in the Dominican Republic and its diaspora, whether under the fukú curse of conquest and colonialism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or in the midst of a near-future apocalypse in "Monstro," are the focus of this lecture.
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Papers by Antoinette Hertel
Talks by Antoinette Hertel