Beyond Multiculturalism: Ethnic Studies, Transnationalism, and Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao

This paper places Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao within the context of transnational American Studies to illustrate that the use of the transnational as a category of critique, as Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J.T. Way suggest American Studies Scholars do, leads to a reconsideration of the accomplishments and the limitations of multiculturalism and its academic manifestation, ethnic studies. By highlighting new migratory patterns, intercultural exchanges, and inter-national dependencies, Díaz’s work can be read as a response to uncritical celebrations of difference and multiculturalism’s narrative of the integration of ethnic subjects. These depictions, I argue, are central to a challenge of concepts of nationhood that persist in forming the basis of multiculturalis

Postmodern Vernaculars : Chicana Literature and Postmodern Rhetoric

Postmodern Vernaculars examines the work of Chicana authors such as Gaspar de Alba, Anzaldúa, Cantú, Castillo, Cisneros, Mora, Pérez, and Viramontes in relation to theories of postmodernism. Working with a fluid concept of postmodernism, one that traces the term’s evolution from the 1960s to the present, this book argues that Chicana literature is one vernacular, a regional variation of postmodernism. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarship that postmodernism itself has enabled – specifically recent developments in the fields of geography, ethnography, photography, history, and linguistics – Postmodern Vernaculars shows that Chicana literature participates in the ongoing reconstruction of postmodernism. -- publisherhttps://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/books/1085/thumbnail.jp