Junot Diaz: On the Half-Life of Love

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.