I trace the historical roots of the oral narratives invoked by the book, and I inquire into the way Oscar Wao refashions these narratives as metaphors for contemporary sexual economies in the Americas. And while many critics have inquired into the text’s engagement with other written genres, few have thoroughly examined its use of Caribbean oral narrative. While scholarship has primarily analyzed the novel’s fantastic figures (such as the mongoose and faceless man) through the broad lens of magical realism, my study reads these figures in relation to Caribbean popular culture. This article examines the use of regional oral narratives in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and makes a case for coupling “global,” transnational, or hemispheric readings of this text with a rich sense of regional and local cultural forms.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |