Abstract
Junot Díaz’s writing actively questions the boundaries between genre and
“literary” fiction, aesthetics and politics, and English
and Spanish, using a framework of multiple linguistic, formal and cultural
registers to establish an authorial presence that defies critical
categorization. Díaz arrived explosively on the U.S. literary scene with his
second book, the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao. The multi-generational story of a Dominican American family
overshadowed by a brutal dictatorship and the challenges of forging a new life
in the United States earned many accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. I read Díaz’s transgressive
blending of genre and linguistic registers as a “reverse
colonization” that calls into question the demarcations of
American ethnicity as well as the racial politics of nerds. My argument uses
Díaz as both an object of study and a paradigm for the potential of a hybrid
digital humanities methodology. The complex cultural translation that Díaz asks
his readers to perform creates a middle ground where Caribbean history, language
politics and the class and ethnic tensions of immigration collide with the nerdy
core of the mainstream American imagination.
Junot Díaz’s writing actively questions the boundaries between genre and
“literary” fiction, aesthetics and politics, and English and Spanish, using
a framework of multiple linguistic, formal and cultural registers to establish an
authorial presence that defies critical categorization. Díaz arrived explosively on
the U.S. literary scene with his second book, the novel
The
Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao (2007). The multi-generational story of a
Dominican American family overshadowed by a brutal dictatorship and the challenges
of forging a new life in the United States earned many accolades, including the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Three years
after its publication in 2008 it remained at the top of Amazon's bestseller list for
the “Hispanic American Literature & Fiction” category and is well on its
way to central canonical status. The “galvanic” prose of
Oscar Wao
[1] traverses “tropical magic realism, punk-rock feminism, hip-hop
machismo, post-postmodern pyrotechnics and enough polymorphous multiculturalism
to fill up an Introduction to Cultural Studies syllabus,” to quote two of
the novel’s reviews from
The New York Times, and it
illuminates the rules of contemporary canonicity through the incandescent exceptions
Díaz has carved out [
Scott 2007]
[
Kakutani 2007]. I will read Díaz’s transgressive blending of genre
and linguistic registers as a “reverse colonization” that calls into question
the demarcations of American ethnicity as well as the racial politics of nerds (a
term I define below). My argument uses Díaz as both an object of study and a
paradigm for the potential of a hybrid digital humanities methodology. The complex
cultural translation that Díaz asks his readers to perform creates a middle ground
where Caribbean history, language politics and the class and ethnic tensions of
immigration collide with the nerdy core of the mainstream American imagination.
My methodology in pursuing these claims is to define a framework for “the
literary” in contemporary American fiction by asking how books are
contextualized and discussed not just among critics and scholars but also among a
general readership online. Digital traces of book culture (by which I mean user
reviews, ratings and the algorithmic trails that our browsing and purchasing actions
leave online) allow us to make claims about relatively large groups of readers and
consumers of books, creating opportunities for the ‘distant reading’ of literary
fame, but without losing the specificity of individual texts and authors.
[2] As we shall see, this approach attempts
to find a middle ground between the trend for large scale, data-driven digital
humanities research and the kinds of analysis more comfortable to traditional
literary scholars. My research here incorporates book reviews from professional
critics and everyday users of the websites Amazon and LibraryThing as well as
automated recommendation networks operating on both of those sites. By considering
these digital traces of reading through the conceptual frame of the network, this
article explores literary culture as a process of contextualization and elevation.
My approach draws from John Guillory’s work on cultural capital and his argument
that the syllabus and the list are central to the process of canon-making [
Guillory 1995, 28–38]. The list, expanded into multiple
dimensions, becomes the network. These new dimensions are visible articulations of
taste: both book reviews and website recommendations make certain cultural
assertions about the relationships between various texts and authors. By recasting
these assertions as links and the names and titles as nodes, we can begin to see
where books cluster and where they remain solitary. This is a way of studying the
social forces influencing books and readers at their intersection with literary
production itself, and it draws on related approaches that James English and Mark
McGurl have pioneered in their work on contemporary literary culture, and more
distantly from Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu [
Bourdieu 1993]
[
Bourdieu 1996]
[
Bourdieu 2007]
[
English 2005]
[
Latour 2005]
[
McGurl 2009]. In short, I propose a turn in the digital humanities to
incorporate not just algorithms but algorithmic culture into our critical framework
and to recognize that humans and machines are learning to read in new ways.
[3]
Network analysis allows us to explore the middle ground between the individual text
and the distant reading of thousands of texts, exploring the emerging space of
cultural distinction for a particular author’s work at a particular time.
[4] It is this combination of specificity (in
terms of time and authors) and generality (in the sense that hundreds or thousands
of data-points might influence a particular configuration between books) that offers
us a window into a changing system of literary prestige, a glimpse at the middle
ground where readers and critics make their judgments within constrained horizons.
Professional book reviewing and commercial consumption are two major intersections
between the worlds of art and commerce, zones of exchange where popular canonicity
and literary prestige are forged. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the boundary has never been as blurred between the
experimental work and the
bestseller,” a truth that can
hardly be better demonstrated than with the runaway commercial and critical success
of Díaz’s
Oscar Wao
[
Bourdieu 1996, 347]. The novel’s deliberate complication of
genre and ethnic literary boundaries has led Díaz to an almost defiant
acknowledgement of his mainstream success: “They’re so happy to claim me as literature because it
makes them all look better. They don’t want to relegate me to areas of ethnic
studies”
[
Céspedes and Torres-Saillant 2000, 905].
This position has led scholarly reception of Díaz to its own complex multivalent
space, with critics from the Latino/a, Caribbean, African Diaspora and Dominican
literary traditions all interpreting his success (Díaz acknowledged each of these
traditions in the interview quoted above). Daniel Bautista agrees that Díaz is
“somewhere both inside and outside
of the ‘‘mainstream,’’” writing fiction that defies a simple binary
between ethnic studies and the mass market [
Bautista 2009, 89].
Indeed, Elena Machado Sáez suggests that “the picture emerging from the criticism of
Oscar
Wao is of a superheroic literary text…that breaks through oppression
to posit an ideally marginal but resistant diasporic subject”
[
Sáez 2011, 525]. A reaction to this superheroic reading argues
instead that the novel is a darker meditation on the violence inherent in narrative.
For example, the text’s own charming but dictatorial narrator (Yunior, a version of
a recurrent protagonist from Díaz’s earlier stories) serves as a troubling proxy for
its primary narrative engine, the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic from the 1930s–1960s [
Hanna 2010]. Reading the novel as a
“historiographic battle royale” clearly aimed at a United States reader, as
Monica Hanna does, neatly encapsulates the challenges Díaz’s work poses to the
established categories of genre
[5] and comfortable
patterns of reading. Its gripping style conceals a refusal to translate along
multiple axes: the novel does not gloss its Spanish and Spanglish slang for that
mainstream reader, nor does it contextualize its references to Caribbean literary
figures like Edouard Glissant any more than it explicates its allusions to comic and
fantasy characters like Darkseid or Sauron. This “weird English,” as Evelyn
Nien-Ming Ch’ien calls it, demands that its readers bridge the gap, confronting the
untranslatable and interpolating around it, grappling with Díaz’s rebellious
idiom.
By insisting on blending codes and discourses beyond Dominican and “standard”
English, Díaz alienates himself from particular communities in the tradition of
commercially successful postcolonial writers around the globe [
Brouillette 2007, 60]. In applying the same technique to
subcultures within the mainstream United States, he makes a subtler point about
racial politics. As an immigrant, Díaz did not take solace in his identity as a
Dominican American, since that identity was continually pressured by poverty and
racial bias. Instead, he claims “what
saved my life was being a nerd, watching all those bad science fiction movies
and reading cartoons”
[
Ch’ien 2004, 221]. Díaz doubly rejects normative behavior,
embracing neither the standards of his own ethnic community nor those of mainstream
American culture. This renunciation is standard nerd practice, but the staging is
usually quite different. The nerd is a complex and shifting figure in contemporary
culture with its roots in what Mary Bucholtz calls “hyperwhite” performance,
including “superstandard English” (like Oscar Wao with his “flash words”)
and the rejection of “cool” culture [
Bucholtz 2001, 86, 87]
[
Díaz 2007, 50]. I extend this frame to assert that the nerd is
defined in relation not merely to “superstandard” language but highly specific
dialects — the mastery of technoscientific skills, obscure popular genres and,
increasingly, a socially impermissible obsession with almost any arcane subject. For
example wine nerds, XML nerds and comic book nerds are all likely to be among the
readers of this article. In this sense, the nerd as I deploy the term here is an
extreme version of the “fan” or “fanboy,” a phrase Díaz also uses and to
which I will return below.
With Díaz as just one example, it is also important to note that the racial
categorization of the nerd is becoming increasingly nuanced, with Michael Hanson
defining the “Afrogeek” categories of “thug-nerds” and “rap-geeks”
[
Hanson 2007]. Oscar’s status as an ambiguously dark-skinned Dominican
completes his own hybrid role as a “GhettoNerd”
[
Díaz 2007, 32, 11]. In fact, as Ron Eglash notes, the figure of
the nerd is not so much a bastion of white male elitism as it is a “potential paradox that might allow greater
amounts of gender and race diversity into the potent locations of
technoscience” because it is not racially but performatively white, or
“implicitly white”
[
Eglash 2002, 50, 60]. While the future of nerds may be defined
more by Barack Obama than
The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy,
whiteness continues to function as a powerful stigma and defining attribute of the
category, leading African American students who excel in science and technology to
be accused of “‘acting
white’” even as it sustains a form of “hyperwhiteness” performed
by nerds of all kinds [
Eglash 2002, 59]. Díaz’s choice to deploy
the dialects of comic book nerds, science fiction nerds and others establishes a
correspondence between ethnic boundaries and the deep, nerdy interior of the
mainstream white imagination.
Allow me to develop this point through my own nerd self-affirmation as I discuss my
methodology. The data I present here is drawn from literary culture “in the
wild” — newspaper and magazine book reviews along with traces of digital
consumption (consumer reviews and automated recommendations) from the websites
Amazon and LibraryThing. Each of these sources links us to only a fraction of Díaz’s
public readership, but they are communities of literary practice that illuminate how
his stylistic project has played out in the mainstream. I will use two basic sets of
data to build these empirical arguments. First, book reviews: I have collected and
analyzed a set of professional reviews, author profiles and other literary press
from nationally recognized newspapers and magazines, as well as a complementary
database of consumer book reviews from Amazon.
[6] I identify the proper nouns, particularly authors and texts
that are mentioned together in these book reviews and create networks based on the
number of times different terms co-occur in the same paragraph.
[7] Over the course of this
research project I assembled a hand-tooled dictionary of proper nouns and used a
Perl script to seek potential matches in individual documents from this corpus
(repeating the process numerous times as I extended the dictionary). The script
created a series of basic XML files with proper nouns tagged as nodes that I checked
for errors before analyzing for co-occurrences using another set of Perl scripts
that indexed those nodes by paragraph. I stored the resulting connections in a MySQL
database and output co-occurrences in GraphML format for viewing with yEd, a network
graph editor [
yWorks GmbH 2011].
The result is a basic network of primary literary entities — authors and texts — that
are explicitly named
[8] in particular
paragraphs of Díaz’s professional and consumer book reviews. As a brief example, if
we were to apply this system to a one-sentence review that said “Díaz reminds me of Frank Herbert, but also of Julia Alvarez,”
we would get the following:
The co-occurrence links all three nodes in an equal, non-directional way. The method
treats each paragraph as a “bag of words” with no attention paid to syntax or
nuance. Replacing the review above with the following would generate the same
diagram: “Díaz is nothing like Frank Herbert or Julia Alvarez.” This may seem
counterintuitive, but I posit that the fact of connection is at least as important
as its tenor. As I have argued elsewhere, the canonizing influence of a reference or
a list in a piece of criticism serves to put the books in question into the same
context, even if the reference itself is negative [
Finn 2011, 16]. Another way of making this point is to consider the peculiar economy of the book
review, a piece of publicly oriented secondary literature challenged with keeping
the reader’s attention in a compressed format that is by definition a metanarrative.
The set of major reviewing publications yielded 22 articles on Díaz, with an average
word length of 1,294. By contrast I collected 613 Amazon reviews, averaging just
under 166 words each. Reviewers deploy references with purpose in this context, and
a negative comparison carries as much cultural weight for the reader as a positive
one, establishing in both cases a contextual framework for the subject of the
review.
As the average lengths indicate, this economy is especially true for reviewers on
Amazon, where the competition for literary attention is sharpened by multiple
reviews of the same book and the status of the arbiter is always in question. My
methodology compares these two fields of literary discourse through the framework of
proper noun networks. Tracing these webs of allusion, reference and context allows
us to explore both sides of that great literary event horizon, the purchasing of a
book. While there are of course exceptions, people tend to read professional critics
before they buy something, and they tend to write Amazon reviews afterwards. If book
critics are “gatekeepers” to the literary marketplace, readers on Amazon report
back from beyond the turnstiles, telling us why they went through. Below we will see
that as the balance of power between the two groups shifts, everyday readers are
coming to define the “literary” in new ways.
The project’s second data set, recommendations, focuses on this literary exchange as
a market: I have collected data from Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, and
LibraryThing, a leading “social reading” community site, regarding how
consumers on Amazon associate books through their shopping patterns and readers on
LibraryThing do the same by listing books together in their virtual libraries.
Amazon and LibraryThing present this data in recommendations such as the
“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” mechanism on Amazon, providing
an algorithmically driven feedback loop between accumulated acts of cultural
distinction and specific kinds of literary desire. In this instance, I used Perl
scripts to record an expanding web of recommendations on each site from a given
start page (arbitrarily selected by me as the author in question’s most prestigious
book). For Amazon, the script would start at
Oscar Wao
and record the first ten
[9]
“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” links, and then move on to record
the first ten links on each of those pages, continuing to three levels of depth. The
same process was repeated for LibraryThing based on the first ten “LibraryThing
recommendations.” As a brief example of how these recommendations are
diagrammed, consider this excerpt from Figure 4:
In this data, the lines between nodes have directionality: browsers on the Oscar Wao page will see a link pointing them towards
Kavalier & Clay. Likewise, those starting out
on the Chabon page will see a link back to Oscar Wao.
In this case, Amazon believes that readers of one book will enjoy the other, and the
two texts end up mutually supporting each other in the larger system of
recommendations.
The mutual link is based, Amazon claims, primarily on purchase data: enough people
who bought one book went on to purchase the other that Amazon codified the
connection, hoping to entice further sales from users making a similar cultural
calculus. The fact that this feedback loop is maintained, manipulated and studied by
Amazon speaks both to our increasingly corporate cultural lives and to the
importance of recognizing the contingency of data — all data. Amazon sells books and
manipulates its recommendations in order to sell them more efficiently, so it is
possible that the mutual connection above is shaped by other factors, such as
marketing campaigns, but we can rest assured that the connection is productive, or
it would be replaced by another, more productive one.
[10] That is to say that given Amazon’s dominance,
we can assume it is reasonably deft at this particular cultural game: acting as an
algorithmic mirror to its users’ literary desires, inflecting and reflecting taste
through countless computations and statistical judgments.
A full analysis of Amazon’s growing dominance in literary production, from author
contracts to sales, is beyond the scope of this article, but I want to briefly
sketch out its role and my reasons for studying it. At this stage the relevance of
Amazon to mainstream literary life is hard to deny, if we give any credence to
critics like John O’Brien, publisher of the Dalkey Archive Press, who believes
“the greatest threat to book
publishing in the United States right now is Amazon” (quoted in [
White 2011]). Whatever role Amazon plays in our readerly futures, its
role in the present is to influence a huge number of acts of literary distinction,
and to study these acts is to explore a core sample of mainstream American literary
culture. And it is mainstream in all the ways Díaz inflected that term above: its
users are better-educated, wealthier and less likely to be Hispanic than the U.S.
Internet user average [
Quantcast 2011]. Reading Díaz through Amazon is
to read him through a broad American public still rooted in a white mainstream,
unveiling a cultural politics of authenticity and success that surfaces constantly
in the data below. That contest of literacies is mirrored by my methodology’s
contest for what Ted Striphas calls “algorithmic literacy”
[
Striphas 2011]. Just as I am “reading” Amazon here, Amazon is
“reading” its users and perfecting algorithms to perform that reading ever
more efficiently and more closely.
For his part, Díaz confronts the question of literacies with a culturally charged
mixture of the familiar and the exotic (an effect that varies in specifics but not
in nature depending on whether the reader identifies most readily as Latino/a or
white, an English professor or a science fiction nerd), and my approach does
something similar by challenging our notions of reading on several levels.
“Reading,” in this framework, is a fundamentally social action, bound up in
collectively negotiated conceptions of language and inflected at every stage by the
sociocultural influences that lead us to books and shape our thinking before, during
and after our direct engagements with them. It is also, as I noted above, a form of
collective interpretation that can be performed by Amazon’s servers as well as human
beings. As more of our literary cultural actions, from browsing to discussion,
migrate to screens and digital media, reading takes place increasingly online.
“Readers,” then, are the users visible through their aggregate choices in
the methodology just described.
[11] It should also be
noted that professional critics and Amazon reviewers are not necessarily distinct,
though I have yet to encounter a professional critic who also voluntarily (or
openly) reviews books on the site. But of course there are overlaps — this is a
marketplace, and professional critics influence markets, just as markets influence
critics — perhaps the most obvious being that many critics purchase books on Amazon.
The middle ground perspective that I adopt here balances out the impact of such
individual overlaps by looking at reviews and recommendations in aggregate,
exploring the remarkable public literary spaces created by thousands of readers
online.
Negocios: The Literary Marketplace
Where established authors have clearly defined canonical positions, Díaz is an
authorial signifier whose meaning is still being negotiated by arbiters from all
corners of the literary universe. In the few years since its publication,
Oscar Wao has already appeared on hundreds of college
and high school syllabi.
[12] Yet Díaz
continues to hold a fluctuating position in networks of literary prestige as
groups of readers contextualize him in various ways. The literary marketplace is
the most active and hotly contested zone of cultural distinction, capturing both
the influence of other, less commercial forms of critical elevation (book
reviews, best books of the decade lists, etc.) and the direct impact of school
reading assignments. We can glimpse these competing forces by contrasting Díaz’s
presence in Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” networks
at a particular point in time with a look at persistent nodes in the same
network over several months. Figures 3–6 represent those texts recommended from
the Amazon page of
Oscar Wao at four roughly
monthly intervals from December 2010 to March 2011, with Figure 5 combining the
data into a holistic view of persistent nodes.
In early December Díaz appears in the context of mainstream commercial success,
surrounded by novels that straddle the middlebrow zone between critical acclaim
and mass popularity like
White Teeth,
The Road,
Olive
Kitteridge and
The Known World (Figure
3). One axis of distinction at work here is clearly the Pulitzer:
Tinkers won the prize in 2010, as did every other text
just mentioned. Where the networks of more established authors often present
multiple valences of influence (Oprah's Book Club selections, genre connections
and biographical affiliations, for example), Díaz is being read here primarily
in the context of the Pulitzer. I will speculate (briefly) that we see the
holiday shopping season at work here and the release of major lists such as the
New York Times
“Best Books of the Year.”
Oscar Wao spent far more time on the bestseller
lists in paperback than it did in hardcover, and its status as a significant
book of the decade was clearly being cemented in editorial offices around the
country. The gift-giving season also signals prime advertising, and publishers
can allegedly “buy” recommendations on Amazon just as they can rent display
cases and sales areas at brick and mortar stores [
Roychoudhuri 2010]. While reliable sales numbers are elusive, the website NovelRank tracks
Amazon’s Sales Rank metric and traced a surge for
Oscar
Wao’s ranking from 2,652 on November 29, 2010 to its best position
of the year, 209 on January 21, 2011 [
NovelRank 2011].
[13]
Since the rank of 1 is assigned to the top-selling book on Amazon at any given
time, December and January were obviously very good months for
Oscar Wao, which would correlate with a shift in
Díaz’s recommendations context. The feedback loop of advertising and consumer
desire plays a major role here, in this case highlighting those texts with the
prestigious gold stickers that embody prize capital. Díaz is on a rare plane of
the publishing world at this moment, placed among books that are expected to
sell hundreds of thousands of copies. While we might draw a number of these
texts together around the rubric of travelers and homelands, we can only
encompass all of them by calling them prize-winners, list-makers,
blockbusters.
By the end of December, this newly commercial position has begun a shift into
something else: another Pulitzer-winner, Michael Chabon, appears in the network
and the Caribbean classics Dreaming in Cuban and
In the Time of the Butterflies are linked in
Oscar Wao’s first-order subnet (Figure 4).
These, along with the Spanish-language edition of Oscar
Wao, clearly align Díaz with a particular genre, once again placing
him back in the context of the list Amazon calls “Hispanic
& Latin American Fiction.” Nevertheless, he remains a literary
gateway from this genre of ethnic literature to a distinct canon of mainstream
prize-winners. Díaz’s academic audience also makes itself known here with
another critical text on migration issues linked to Oscar
Wao. These shifting networks mark out the ways in which multiple
constituencies, responding to different elements of Díaz’s fiction, vie for
cultural dominance in contextualizing his work. In Figure 4 these forces almost
seem to be pulling Oscar Wao in different
directions, creating a more nuanced kind of prestige — an effect that will be
evident below as competing cultural forces seek to interpret Díaz through
reviews of his work.
In January and February of 2011, Díaz readers begin to link him into a grander
plane of the mainstream American canon, first superseding the genre barrier to
align him with Allen Ginsberg and Robert Haas, and later linking him to
established major novelists Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo (Figure 5, Figure 6).
At the same time, he is, like Morrison before him, helping to transform a
loosely defined genre into a clearly demarcated space of literary study. The
anthology Latino Boom does not excerpt Díaz
directly, but Amazon claims it is frequently bought together with both Oscar Wao and Dreaming in
Cuban, and it is not difficult to imagine the literature classes
currently being taught around those three texts. The simultaneous emergence of
professional anthologies and affiliation with established canonical titans like
Morrison and DeLillo also mark an inversion point for Díaz where his work is no
longer in need of illustration and explanation, but can now be used to
reinterpret established canons. The transition marks the moment where race and
gender cease to operate as explicit categorical functions (i.e. “Hispanic & Latin American Fiction”) and instead
become implicit gravitational forces for a mainstream canon that includes
Morrison and Díaz but remains predominantly white and male.
As Díaz teeters between “ethnic studies” and mainstream canonicity, we can
get a clearer glimpse of the enduring substructure of his fame when we limit our
network only to explore links that have persisted across several monthly
snapshots. Figure 7 offers a completely different view of Díaz, identifying him
as a peripheral member of a Latin Caribbean literary community dominated by
Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros and Esmeralda Santiago. These
sustained links mark Díaz squarely within an ethnic tradition of writing
inspired by the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Puerto Rico. Just as striking is
the extent to which this particular sub-genre is represented on Amazon by female
authors. When Díaz is compared to other writers of what booksellers might call
“serious literary fiction” the list is almost entirely male, but here
the market tells a different story, placing Díaz on the edge of a subnet of
immigration narratives penned by, and largely about, women. Celebrated for his
innovative style, his nerd credentials and his esoteric references, Díaz is
still defined primarily by genre in the market.
“Across and Back”: Professional Reviewers
If the commercial status of Díaz’s work continues to shift between the registers
of big ambitious novels, Latin American fiction,
New
Yorker elect and pop culture fandom, his various readerships present
him in a different light when the question of context is no longer framed
through book shopping. In the network of authors and texts mentioned at least
twice in Díaz’s professional book reviews, the author of
Oscar Wao is contextualized through multiple registers (Figure 8,
with more frequently linked notes at the top). When professional critics write
about Díaz, they unsurprisingly mention him in the same paragraph as
Oscar Wao and
Drown more
often than any other terms, and that shared presence is our unit of measurement
here. But the next most frequent co-occurrence in the network is Rafael
Trujillo, marking the significance of
Oscar Wao’s
engagement with Dominican history. Díaz would no doubt be pleased to learn that
the “Dictatingest Dictator” whose malevolence overshadows his novel is also
haunting his reviews very effectively as critics situate
Oscar Wao within a Caribbean context [
Díaz 2007, 80]. The larger network bears out this point, freighted as it is with
nodes like Tolkien and
Dune. Critics often used
David Foster Wallace as an exemplar in discussing Díaz’s footnotes, though in
his own reviews Wallace tended to have his complex arrangements of cultural
references described rather than explained [
Finn 2011]. Yet here
Díaz’s footnotes and allusions are extensively unpacked by reviewers introducing
readers to this strange new beast, the nerdy immigration narrative. Díaz himself
is an author who needs explaining before readers can be told about his work —
the Oscar Wilde node here reflects Díaz’s story, repeated by several reviewers,
about the mispronunciation of “Wilde” in Spanish and the easy segue it
offers for describing the author’s transnational, bilingual work.
Yet in many ways, Díaz’s fiction is much more polylingual and multicultural than
it is merely a combination of English and Spanish. The diversity of references
indicates a lack of consensus among professional reviewers. As a Dominican
American, Díaz falls easily into the Caribbean and Latin American spaces of
Derek Walcott, Gustavo Perez Firmat, Francisco Goldman and Mario Vargas Llosa.
As a writer describing oppression and ethnic tension, his work aligns with Zora
Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. Yet he is also firmly linked to
popular culture, from Tolkien to Stephen King, and many of the single-instance
references not shown here trace those connections, from Sauron and Mordor to
Star Wars and
The
Matrix. The presence of Dickens in the diagram brings particular
nuances to Díaz’s role as a literary protestor and political activist. A review
of
Drown in the
Los Angeles
Times suggests that it is “artists who offer most of us the only way across and back” between
immigrant hardships and the comfortable mainstream [
Eder 1996].
Díaz’s almost lustful exposure of a cultural underbelly is, it seems, just what
we mainstream American readers need — the challenges of immigration and (with
Oscar Wao) political repression brought to life
in fiction. And yet the authentic experience, the “horrors below” that the
review describes as Díaz’s core subject, include not only colonial and immigrant
nightmares but the deep interior of the American nerd imaginary —
Star Trek,
The Lord of the
Rings and comic books celebrated primarily by a subset of the white
mainstream. Díaz’s work as a go-between does not stop at providing the
mainstream with news from the subaltern underbelly of ‘“ethnic studies.”’
This review presages that element of critical reaction to
Oscar Wao which marveled at Díaz’s particularly American cultural
fluency — his comic book knowledge, his literary references, his sitcom
allusions — which served to persistently yank the narrative out of ethnic
literature and into the cultural mainstream, troubling both spheres to remind
readers that these dramas were playing out not in some stylized America but the
same landscape we inhabited already. In 2007 Díaz described his intention to
contaminate the real with all this
nerdy narrative, and then the same way just doing the exact reverse —
contaminating the nerdy with the painfully real….[F]anboys and consumers of
what we’ll call “nerd culture” resist any infection by the real.
Fanboys will go out of their way, they’ll bend over backwards to swear to
God that J.R.R. Tolkien has no racist elements, which is hilarious. [Zaurino 2007]
This two-way contamination haunts the Díaz review network in Figure 8 and its
tight link between social and genre boundaries is reflected by critics who work
to convey the complexity of Díaz’s stance, his position across and against
established genres, through the very language of genre itself.
Middle Earth: Trujillo, Fantasy and American Publics
The process of literary reverse colonization, of deliberately contaminating the
language of one discourse with the icons of another, has drawn a diverse
readership around
Oscar Wao and Díaz’s work as a
whole. When we use the same methodological lens to explore co-occurrences in
Amazon reviews (Figure 9), it is immediately obvious that the most prominent
nodes in both networks are identical.
[14] Like professional
critics, “real” readers respond to the dark history at the heart of Díaz’s
work, making Trujillo an even more central node in the network than Díaz’s first
book,
Drown, and the centrality of Trujillo in both
networks speaks to the character’s influence over reader reactions. By
personifying history so pointedly in Trujillo and adapting a distinctly American
cultural mythos to convey that history, Díaz not only earned accolades but also
achieved the rare accomplishment of eliciting the same reaction across the
board, from both professional and non-professional readers. The Trujillo we see
at the center of this network is the “prototypical Latin American caudillo”
Díaz describes in his first footnote for
Oscar
Wao, establishing this postmodern literary device
as a vehicle for subaltern history, rage and cultural reference all at once:
“He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our
Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so
perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass
up”
[
Díaz 2007, 2, n1]. The escalating rhetoric is hilarious and
sad at the same time, presenting the anger of the Dominican people in the
slightly bemused and jaded tone of a partisan scholar scoring points in, of
course, a footnote. Sauron, arch-villain of the
Lord of the
Rings, is a connection that many readers make, but Arawn and
Darkseid, of
The Chronicles of Prydain and the DC
Comics universe, raise the stakes, signaling a level of fandom and genre
knowledge that leaves most readers behind and imposing a surprising
metanarrative on the metacomment of the footnote itself.
If we look at the center of Figure 9 as a series of triangles, we can see Díaz’s
game of cultural stacking as readers uncover and interpret his layers of
reference. The central, expected triangle is between Díaz and his two published
books. But this core is mirrored and even overshadowed by the triangle Trujillo
forms with Díaz and Oscar Wao: the dictator
actually overwhelms discussion of Díaz in the literary context of his short
stories in favor of the history of the Dominican Republic. Yet this triangle,
too, has its reflection in the shape Tolkien makes with Díaz and Trujillo, a
cultural echo or inversion that manages to humanize this alien history for
American readers and demonize its antagonist in one fell swoop. This narrative
doubling and redoubling, which appears so seamlessly in the casual references
Díaz works into his novel, becomes its own source of challenging discussion as
readers identify its different narrative components.
The racism inherent in Middle Earth is a metaphor Díaz does not employ so much as
he reverse colonizes it, suggesting that the cherished fantasy series confronts
the same dark impulses that overshadow Dominican history and the lives of
immigrants in the United States today. Shadows and darkness — these are the
terms that Díaz seeks to trouble for us across the cultural landscape of
four-color archvillains. Trujillo, that “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulato who bleached his
skin” is a figure from the same troubled color zone as these imagined
enemies; the forces of evil we have so carefully illustrated as unreal are still
manifestations of real fears, hatreds and bigotries [
Díaz 2007, 2, n1]. A whole segment of the nerd demographic is drawn to Díaz
through the magic of that Tolkien triangle, recognizing him as one of their own.
One tongue-in-cheek writer suggests that Díaz has given him the perfect snapshot
of Dominican culture, with injuries explained “in terms of hit points — perfect for those of us who
understand how similar life is to the terms laid out in the
Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook
”
[
Fogle 2010]. The connection to
Dungeons
& Dragons is particularly significant since it links
Oscar Wao to a performative, collective form of
fan-driven narrative. Just as players gather around a table and transform die
rolls and paper notes into an act of collective imagination, Díaz calls on his
readers to reinterpret a literally “alien” story through uniquely American
touchstones, to use their well-developed faculties of the fantastic to conjure
up the discomfiting real.
The series of triangles in the center of this graph marks off two territories,
then, serving as “the pivot along which
the culture swings” in the world literary system of commodifying
authentic ethnicity [
Okie 2008].
[15] The space above the
triangles is the one Díaz was thinking of when he mentioned fanboys protecting
their sacred Tolkien. As one reader described this divide:
If you love any of the great Latin American modernists,
or American writers like Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, and the recently departed
David Foster Wallace, or if you can imagine a great combination of the two,
then this book is for you…Diaz [sic] my man, wherever you are, know that
you're the best you are at what you do, and a No-Prize is winging its way to
you through the phantom mailways of the Universal Nerd Alliance! [Smith 2009]
Here the full cultural territory is laid out. Díaz combines the “great Latin
American modernists” and “American writers,” and his transcultural
work has earned him a “No-Prize,” an iconic non-award Marvel Comics bestows
on readers who successfully identify and rationalize continuity problems in the
ever-expanding Marvel Universe. In other words, Díaz brings together the
political, historical discourse of Latin America and the innovative energy of
the best contemporary (white, male) American writers, uniting them in a literary
package that reinterprets both according to the logic of an ironic nerd
discourse.
We can get a second bearing on this subcurrent, this
other
metanarrative in the Trujillo footnote quoted above, by exploring another
data set, one that stands between the diffuse network of Amazon purchase-driven
recommendations and the highly intentional acts of contextualization drawn from
literary reviews. The website LibraryThing encourages book collectors and
aficionados to join a “social reading” community by sharing their
libraries, book reviews, local literary events and other reading activities. The
gravitational center of the site is the user library, where individuals can
itemize, categorize, rate and review their book collections. Each work has its
own page, much like on Amazon, but the commercial undertone is largely replaced
by a social one: browsers can see which other users have read a particular book
or see what books others have recommended for those who enjoyed a particular
title.
[16] In effect, this creates a voluntary,
non-commercial, user-generated analog to the purchase-driven recommendations on
Amazon. True to its social mission, LibraryThing also allows other users to
endorse or critique a particular recommendation with a “thumbs up or thumbs
down” mechanism, allowing us to measure the strength of positive and
negative ties within this network of texts. When we graph this recommendation
network, the results are dramatically different from Amazon, in part because of
the uneven results of such crowdsourcing.
To begin with, this human hive-mind recommendation network is less consistent
than Amazon’s algorithms, which typically churn out 80 or more recommendations
for each text. Here, the number varies, with Oscar
Wao attracting fifteen suggestions but the average node in its
three-level network garnering only 2.28. In this sense, the network is already
much more representative of social position: instead of an artificial ten
out-links per node, an organic mesh emerges where edge counts demonstrate a real
form of popularity. In addition, this network is much more stable, determined
not by a constantly fluctuating flow of sales transactions but a much more
permanent record of votes left by readers and endorsed by others asynchronously
over a period of months or years.
Hence measurements of prestige carry even more weight here, based as they are on
human intentionality weighted by reader votes for or against
particular recommendations. My definition of prestige is one of the simplest in
network theory: nodes with the highest number of incoming links are the most
prestigious. This measure of “importance” in a network graph aligns closely
with the idea of a canonical text that is frequently listed in that canon. In this case, the links are weighted
according to the number of votes each received from other users, so a link with
four votes would count twice as much as a link with two.
This is not to say that the LibraryThing recommendations are any more definitive
or unbiased than Amazon’s, merely that they represent a different space of
literary consumption. Where Amazon’s recommendations are presumably influenced
by thousands of users and transactions, on LibraryThing only ten different users
offered suggestions for Oscar Wao (though these
suggestions were then voted on by a handful of other users). And the
LibraryThing group as a whole has its demographic skew, just as our other
reading groups do, which becomes apparent when we look at “prestige”
rankings for books in the three-level Oscar Wao
network (Table 1).
Title
|
Author
|
Centrality as % of Highest Score
|
Nineteen Eighty-Four
|
George Orwell |
1 |
Brave New World
|
Aldous Huxley |
0.62 |
Fahrenheit 451
|
Ray Bradbury |
0.42 |
The Giver
|
Lois Lowry |
0.34 |
A Clockwork Orange
|
Anthony Burgess |
0.27 |
The Handmaid's Tale
|
Margaret Atwood |
0.26 |
The Shadow of the Wind
|
Carlos Ruiz Zafón |
0.23 |
Animal Farm
|
George Orwell |
0.22 |
Crime and Punishment
|
Fyodor Dostoevsky |
0.22 |
The Master and Margarita
|
Mikhail Bulgakov |
0.2 |
…
|
|
|
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
|
Junot Díaz |
0.11 |
Table 1.
Prestige in Díaz LibraryThing Network
Between Orwell, Burgess, Bradbury, Lowry and Huxley, a clear dystopian, science
fiction bent makes itself evident here. In short, we have entered the realm of
the “fanboys,” the American nerd culture that Díaz so deftly adapts to
Oscar’s “alien” life in New Jersey. Just as some reviewers of the novel on
Amazon found Díaz’s nerd credentials comforting as they learned about the
“foreign” culture of Dominican Americans, here we can see Díaz
interpreted through a community that is itself positioned deep in a particular
territory of genre fiction.
The direct connections from
Oscar Wao (Figure 10)
belie the dystopian cast of the broader LibraryThing network but still bear out
its nerd credentials. Readers link Díaz to both science fiction (Cory Doctorow)
and graphic novels (Chris Ware) as well as elements of the American popular
contemporary canon, including John Irving’s
The World
According to Garp and Chabon’s
The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. As in the Amazon network, Díaz is
also brought into contact with a Latin American subnet including the familiar
García Márquez, Llosa and Alvarez. The LibraryThing interface offers these book
nerds a way to gloss their recommendations, a feature two of them have taken
advantage of on the
Oscar Wao page.
In the Time of Butterflies is recommended because
“
Oscar Wao mentions
In the
Time of the Butterflies in a footnote. Both dealing so
gracefully with the Trujillo regime, they seem like complementary
books”
[
LibraryThing]. The textbook is suggested “to learn more about the DR, and for an essay by
Junot Díaz.” In both cases, readers are specifically instructing one
another in the context of Díaz’s universe, taking his footnotes at educational
face value and collaborating to produce a better network.
These signs of “social reading” signal the appeal of LibraryThing’s basic
structure as a collective database of libraries and book notes, a space
populated by literary nerds with a penchant for cataloging and sharing their
collections. This is our clearest view of Díaz’s effective mobilization of the
subaltern nature of nerd culture, or what Matt Hills calls the “‘improper’ identity” of a
fan defined by genre cultural artifacts [
Hills 2002, xii]).
The fan, or that more intense instantiation, the nerd, functions as a cultural
minority
within the American mainstream. The fan’s engagements with
texts move beyond consumption into the realm of the creative, as Henry Jenkins
argues. Building on Pierre Levy’s concept of collective intelligence, Jenkins
sees communities like this LibraryThing network as “some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's
cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective
production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and
fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular
culture”
[
Jenkins 2002]. In light of Díaz’s novel, these impulses also echo
the Caribbean traditions Edouard Glissant lays out of
métissage, a mixing and hybridity of peoples, languages
and cultures, and relation, a form of engaging the other that does not rely on
erasing or ignoring difference but accepting it as a kind of sacred truth [
Glissant 1997, 47–62]. The sacrament of the nerd is to
embrace the weird and the obscure in a celebration of those very distancing
qualities. But the LibraryThing nerd is still a figure deeply linked to
projections of whiteness who energetically pursues what Glissant calls the
Western impulse of filiation — ordering, ranking and categorizing the universe
and striving for empirical mastery.
The
Oscar Wao page, an attractor for reader
interest, utilizes a number of the site’s filiation features that can tell us
more about Díaz’s interactions with these book nerds. In classic fan form, users
have filled out an extensive Wikipedia-like entry on the book, including a list
of major characters, the endorsement quotes on the book jacket, important places
in the text, et cetera. This level of detail goes beyond even what Amazon’s deep
pockets will finance for its book pages, matching the definitions of
collaborative fan cultures identified by scholars like Jenkins and Jason Mittell
[
Jenkins 2008], [
Mittell 2009]. These links echo
the productive literary spirit of The Annotated Oscar Wao site, where users can
contribute to a reader’s guide that offers translations, glosses and links to
further reading, much of it on Wikipedia [
Flournoy 2008]. The
Annotated Oscar Wao is another complex collective reaction to Díaz, combining
elements of both relation and filiation in discussing and glossing his work. In
such interpretive spaces, Díaz’s readers can respond to his nerd discourse in
kind, celebrating his writing as it references fan universes from
The Lord of the Rings to
The
Fantastic Four. These sustained engagements with his work
demonstrate how successfully Díaz drives real dialog with multiple audiences,
and this is the crucial pivot on which his game of politicizing language
turns.
Revenge of the Nerd: The Middle Territories of Díaz and Digital Humanities
By drawing together Spanish, English, the literary, the nerdy and other
discourses into one vibrant creole, Díaz successfully appeals to a broad
American readership. But his particular embrace of the nerd accomplishes another
goal for the mainstream reader, leading us to confront our own investments in
some cultures but not others. The nerd in the guise of filiation, by pushing
away non-canonical and transgressive elements of his own cultural universe,
defines an extreme, interior superstructure of white popular culture. It is the
tribal narrative of the member who takes his myths too seriously, who tries too
hard and speaks too carefully.
[17] But Díaz inverts this
situation, pulling the figure of the nerd to the outside, putting texts like
The Lord of the Rings in direct conversation
with real cultural others. As a nerd, Oscar Wao is both part of the U.S.
mainstream and a symbol of the many ways it reflects, traffics in and grapples
with African American, Caribbean and other cultural sources for the true power
of the alien and the fantastic.
In refusing to translate Spanish or even italicize it in his work, Díaz is only
one of several bilingual writers exploring the politically charged zone of
code-switching,
[18] but he performs a second kind of
radicalism by engaging the parallel universe of untranslated Elvish. Díaz sees
this blurring of registers as a real political act: “By forcing Spanish back onto English, forcing it to
deal with the language it tried to exterminate in me, I've tried to
represent a mirror-image of that violence on the page. Call it my revenge on
English”
[
Céspedes and Torres-Saillant 2000]. The refusal of italics implicitly asks readers to
perform a contextual interpolation, to
learn the words and sound
them out instead of bracketing them or translating them. Díaz even asserted his
militancy on this issue with the single most important advocate for his career,
the
New Yorker, successfully lobbying them to stop
italicizing foreign language terms [
Anon 2011].
[19] Cast in the light of this linguistic agenda, the continuous reappearance
of Tolkien,
Dune and other terms in the Amazon data
is evidence of a contact zone between nerd and ‘“ethnic studies”’ dialects.
In one striking example, an Amazon reviewer compared Díaz’s use of Spanish to
Tolkien, suggesting “it helps to
create a mood, a feeling of verisimilitude (overused as that word is), a
depth. It really invites you into the inner lives of this Dominican
family”
[
Fisher 2008]. Díaz has worked to make his language difficult in a
particularly productive way, implicitly demonstrating how we are all implicated
in one another’s languages.
[20]
By embracing the elevated diction and obscure references of nerd culture,
Oscar Wao upends our conception of the nerd by linking
it to the traumas of immigrant life. We are all faced with unintelligibility as
readers of
Drown and
Oscar
Wao, brought to confront the fissures between notions of America and
immigrant communities and within the idea of America itself. The multiplicity of
Díaz’s prose, his deliberate polyvocalism, defies conventional ideals of
assimilation by demonstrating just how fragile our notion of the mainstream is,
how easily Oscar can complicate the “hyperwhite” figure of the nerd by
becoming a “ghettonerd.” The psychological fuel that powers this narrative
engine for many readers is the story of Díaz himself, an original ghettonerd,
who began crafting his writing as a response to the ways in which other
immigrant writers catered to mainstream expectations about their lives. Sitting
on a writing panel, he realized that his colleagues “were putting on this mask to try to hide the nerd….The
great silence on that panel was the silence of this experience these guys
lived immediately. Being nerds, loving words, being writers, going to elite
graduate schools, going to elite schools — that was the huge silence”
[
Ch’ien 2004, 226]. Through his assault on the mainstream,
Díaz both refuses to translate and aggressively contextualizes his work, turning
the conflict of authenticity from a silent battleground into a boisterous
network of relations.
This narrative of Díaz the nerd, then, is ultimately a story about reconfiguring
reading, the tale of a violent assault on English to carve out a new political
space for language. By asserting his membership in mutually contradictory
groups, Díaz has led us to spell out our own silent boundaries and ask when
untranslated Spanish is really not the same as untranslated Elvish. One Amazon
reviewer who felt as unfamiliar with his nerd allusions as with his use of
Spanish wrote: “As a white,
middle-aged woman in mid-america [sic], the world of Oscar is about as far
off as another planet. However, thanks to Junot Diaz, I was able to travel
there and be sincerely touched by what I ‘saw’”
[
Reinert 2008]. Just as minorities of previous generations carved
out mainstream distinction by extracting interior white cultural constructs like
Latin verse or classical music and excelling at them, Díaz claims nerdhood as
his own. It is an act of recontextualization, a deft game of what Glissant would
call relation, that depends on fostering reading that embraces many cultural and
national languages. This is, I humbly submit, exactly what scholars in the
digital humanities are engaged in as we struggle to speak in the languages of
humanities departments, coding schema and cultural relevance all at the same
time. We, too, are nerds seeking to change the rules of “reading.”
Like Díaz, I seek to redefine reading by expanding the contested territory:
moving from books themselves to that middle ground of reception and
recommendation. This essay includes close reading and cultural arguments as well
as empirical evidence, shuttling back and forth between academic registers to
make its claims. It approaches Díaz through networks, but not vast and
impersonal ones — they are familiar, culturally localized core samples that
still carry idiosyncratic traces of individual critics and actors. Even the
recommendation networks on Amazon reflect the organic engagement of humans and
algorithms in feedback loops, producing a far more surprising selection of texts
than we might expect from a bookstore or library’s shelving system. In this
sense I believe we need to expand “close” reading by looking carefully at
the full context of a literary network at a particular point in time,
particularly the new dynamic influences of algorithms and digital reading, and
to mark that expansion with the term “middle ground” as I have above.
The payoff of this approach, then, is in the cultural and literary work that the
networks allow me to perform, the argument about the complicated
“otherness” of nerds that builds in the previous two sections. I take
my stand in the middle ground between purely data-driven research, close reading
and cultural critique: a definition of the literary in the digital humanities
that strives for relation as well as filiation. After all, it’s in the middle
ground where culture takes place, particularly online — where our e-books might
come with highlights from an invisible reading collective, where our authors
tweet alongside us, where the game of fame has many more players and many more
goals. As the digital humanities continues to define its position in humanistic
study, I think one of the best arguments we can make is for our own hybridity as
“readers” of many different languages, including software, algorithms
and other digital media. If you accepted my opening claim that reading is a
social enterprise, you should also accept that technology — the digital — is as
well, and that the best digital humanities approaches embrace the social and
cultural criticism lurking within our tools and programs. It’s not enough to
recognize how algorithms read us — we need to learn how to read them. As Díaz
has so elegantly demonstrated, the literary is one more collaborative network,
and it’s time to get everyone thinking about who and what we include in the
conversation.
Notes
[1] Hereafter, an abbreviation for The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao.
[2]
Franco Moretti has defined “distant reading” in contrast to traditional
“close reading” as the study of hundreds or thousands of literary texts
[Moretti 2007]. [3]
Ted Striphas has blazed the trail for the study of “algorithmic culture”
[Striphas 2010]. [4] I
use “network analysis” in the sense of social network analysis, or the
quantitative study of relationships between people and/or objects. For an
introductory overview see Social Network Analysis
[Wasserman and Faust 1994]. [5] By this I mean ethnic and geographical
categories such as Latin American, Caribbean and Dominican fiction as well as
formal “mainstream” cultural categories such as historical fiction,
fantasy, science fiction, comics and literary fiction.
[6] The professional reviews are
drawn from nationally recognized reviewing publications: New York Times, Los Angeles Times,
Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, Nation and
New Yorker. In Díaz’s case, the New Yorker has published more than ten of his stories
but never reviewed his work. Amazon reviews include all reviews of the U.S.,
English-language editions of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao posted before
March 2011.
[7] Defining links
by paragraph instead of sentence or review provides the best level of
granularity for this very simplified approach, avoiding both the complexities of
parsing sentences and the tenuous connections that would result by considering
all proper nouns in the same review as linked.
[8] In the future a more sophisticated algorithm might
identify these proper nouns even when they are described using generic pronouns
or descriptors like “the author,” but such syntactical sophistication was
far beyond my skills as a programmer and remains, to the best of my knowledge, a
challenging problem in algorithmic semantic analysis.
[9] Amazon offers an irregular number of recommendations
depending on the product, typically over 80 per product. I chose to concentrate
on the first 10 as these are most visible to consumers on the site and
presumably represent the strongest connections in the Amazon network.
[10] Amazon’s networks
clearly operate in dialog with external forces such as school syllabi, an
observation I discuss in more detail in a parallel study of Toni Morrison [Finn 2012]. [11] Limiting the field to professional criticism
and the reviews and recommendations of Amazon puts us squarely in the first
world, affluent consumerism that already defines mainstream American literary
culture. When I describe these Amazon consumers as a “general” readership
(and given the demographic constraints already mentioned), I use the phrase
within the confines of that limited cultural space.
[12] This rough measure of prominence can easily be
verified by conducting a targeted Google search for Portable Document Format
files from academic domains such as syllabus “junot diaz” filetype:pdf
site:.edu, which returned 396 files on October 30, 2011. Conducting the same
search for .doc files presented another 93 results.
[13]
NovelRank offers one year of back data, so the year I discuss here stretches
from October 30, 2010 to October 30, 2011 based on date of access.
[14] For all their similarity to the
professional criticism, however, the Amazon reviews are much more diverse in
their references. For the sake of legibility this image has been filtered to
include only nodes with at least two connections to the central subnet
visible here — without this limit, this visible graph would have been ringed
with another layer of nodes with just one or no connections at all to the
core, many of them unique to Amazon readers.
[15] As Sarah Brouillette argues
in her excellent study, “several things characterize the postcolonial literature that achieves
the greatest success in the current market: it is English-language
fiction; it is relatively ‘sophisticated’ or ‘complex’ and
often anti-realist; it is politically liberal and suspicious of
nationalism; it uses a language of exile, hybridity, and
‘mongrel’ subjectivity”
[Brouillette 2007, 61]. [16] Ironically, when Amazon purchased AbeBooks in 2008 it also
purchased a large (but not controlling) stake in LibraryThing [Hendrickson 2008]. So far the site seems to have maintained
its cultural independence. [17] This depiction has its reflection in the
“elaborate ornamentation
imposed on the French language by [Martinican] men of letters”
Glissant describes in Caribbean Overtures
[Glissant 1989, 250]. [18] A number of scholars have written on this subject. For
a clear overview and discussion of the phenomenon in 1990s U.S. literature,
see Lourdes Torres’s “In the Contact Zone”
[Torres 2007]. [19]
Throughout this paper I have written the author’s name with a
diacritical “í,” as he has in both of his books. However his name
has experienced a typographical evolution over the course of his
literary career as publications struggle with his typographical
“foreign accent.” The New York
Times
“Times Topic” page for “Junot Diaz”
continued to have it both ways as late as April 2011, with the
Americanized title belied by book reviews with the name spelled
correctly. Database copies of newspaper reviews reveal a number of
character encoding issues, often replacing the “í” with an error
character similar to “□,” though most databases recognize both
“Diaz” and “Díaz” as potential matches for Junot Díaz.
This is not to argue that such errors are intentional, but rather that
the failure to reproduce non-English diacritical markings, particularly
í, is a sign of telling neglect by U.S. media. Díaz’s choice to
emphasize this aspect of his identity is part of a larger effort to
integrate these markings of cultural difference into the typographical
mainstream.
The story of the “í” is also a technological one: as word processing
software has increasingly made us our own typesetters as well as
editors, scholars and writers of Latino/a and Chicano/a literature have
been able to reclaim the diacritical markings that publishers were once
unwilling or unable to reproduce, a process Paula Moya described to me
in an email on April 15, 2011..
[20] This term also shares productive overlaps with
the term in Latino/a and Caribbean studies known as opacity, an integral
component of the concept of relation [Sáez and Dalleo 2007, 85, 102].