Elena Machado Sáez, Professor of English, Bucknell University will present a public lecture:

“From Dictatorship to the Digital: 
Contexts for Reading Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao”

Caribbean diasporic historical fiction is intimately wedded to the present, informed by the interrelated systems of globalization and multiculturalism. The postcolonial imperative of ethically depicting Caribbean history and subjectivities comes into conflict with the horizon of expectation created by reader reception, and this creative tension inspires the market aesthetics of Caribbean diasporic writing. Reading Junot Díaz as part of a transnational literary trend that troubles the relationship between ethnic writers and their audiences, Machado Sáez analyzes how the novel of Oscar Wao imagines the encounter with the reader in terms of the irreconcilability of gender and sexuality. The first half of the presentation will discuss how Yunior’s dictation of Oscar’s desires is contextualized by the Dominican diaspora’s inheritance of dictatorship. The second half of the presentation will focus on the digital horizons of marginalia that form part of the novel’s reception, especially online annotation projects dedicated to translating Oscar Wao.