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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter
Kittens In The Oven: Race Relations, Traumatic Memory, And The Search For Identity In Julia Alvarez’S How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, Natalie Carter
Natalie Carter
The search for an ever-elusive home is a thread that runs throughout much literature by authors who have immigrated to the United States. Dominican authors are particularly susceptible to this search for a home because “for many Dominicans, home is synonymous with political and/or economic repression and is all too often a point of departure on a journey of survival” (Bonilla 200). This “journey of survival” is a direct reference to the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. The pain and trauma that Trujillo inflicted upon virtually everyone associated with the Dominican Republic …
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Hybridity, Trauma, And Queer Identity: Reading Masculinity Across The Texts Of Junot Díaz, Hannah Fraser Legris
Theses and Dissertations--English
When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must …