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ninican Literature r1igrant enclave in a tdentity as a depen- 111 the problematic 1 the historical tra- . We have seen that political and social ,erate to create the 1 of nationhood is ther, as in the case tee can become its tt makes it easy to rio, but that in the ·ategist whose self- They may also be :urs under the sign em6n Sagredo Jr., an contingency- out this chapter I ibal as types that r the stances they Rico as a mixture arate reality, with res-Gonzalez in t' of Puerto Rico, nd poses an emo- :hat makes home, ers, I describe the mmigrants to the 3 A How-To Guide to Building a Boy Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in Junot Dfaz's Drown To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or poet), but to become, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion. 1 -Trinh T. Minh-ha For me it's more like anti-nostalgic. 2 -Junot Diaz As we have seen in the careers of two intellectuals, Pedro Henriquez Urena and Jose Luis Gonzalez, and in our analyses of fictional constructions of the Dominican migrant in the stories of Lydia Vega and Magali Garcia Ramis, the diasporic subject emerges in zones of contact with an alienated sense of his or her place in the symbolic sphere; some contacts reactivate certain latent zones of contact that have historically layered the "home- land," and that remain as differences lurking under the homogeneous glaze of the country; other contacts are shocks to the coding system of identi- ty-for instance, importantly, race; and all of these contacts are subsumed under the category of the "stranger." For the diasporic subject, as I have been emphasizing, there are two moments in which the 'stranger' image frames the affectivity of the diasporic subject: the moment of displacement and the moment of return. As we will see in this chapter, the relationship between identity and the collective codes of identity are tested in both of these moments, which destructure essentialist assumptions to which the affective organization of the subject is normatively bound. In distinction from the writers and the possibilities of diasporic posi- tioning that we have been dealing with so far, this chapter takes up the question of diasporic identity in the post-Trujillo era in the United States, which occurs as the melting pot model in the United States-the model of assimilation to a white American norm-is breaking down. This chapter takes up the politics of diaspora and asks whether it is pos- sible to think of power relations beyond-or perhaps before-collective identities. Can we understand how power in particular zones of contact plays itself out on the level of individual perceptions? How docs one become, to take the example we have been pursuing in this book, a Dominican •·· .. ~:··.· • 118 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature diasporic subject? Is it a form of induction into a larger narrative one has no part in creating? Do the territorial borders defining diasporic neighbor- hoods and homes independently shape the new social realities one faces in the diaspora, or are these territorial borders themselves established as the unconscious prolongation of the regime of repressed emotions that was formed elsewhere, back in the supposed place of origin? And does origin always stretch backwards into myth? Nietzsche, in the Uses and Disad- vantages of History for Life,1 codified a rebellion against the nineteenth- century orthodoxies of memory and history by asking whether history is not, indeed, the institutional correlate of a disease or wound-of the scars that mark the body and, by extension, mark off territories. Foucault, interpreting this essay in "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History," writes that Nietzsche saw as a sort of illness the compulsion, within Western culture, to return again and again to a "suprahistorical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recogni- tions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past."4 From this perspective, the boundaries that divide and link are not merely the neutral epiphenomena of two cultures or territories in contact: they possess an interior life, replicated in the subject. The identities constructed as a result of these border crossings are ones that are acquired in movement; as the fate of the subject is unfolded, the norm of a stability that would make the subject predictable and identifiable is felt as something false, or at least contingent, to the border crosser. In proportion as the crossing of the border is existentially important, identi- ties become nomadic in the sense that they are not fixed and are in a con- stant state of mutability. I call this form of identity in-movement nomadic following Rosi Braidotti's idea that "nomadic identity" is " ... a theoreti- cal option ... that for me translates into a style of thinking."' I am going to argue, in this chapter, that this nomadic style of thinking and being emerged as the dominant cultural signifier within the Dominican immi- grant experience in the United States from the 1960s to the present and can be seen in the diasporic Dominican literature. One of the clearest expres- sions of the nomadic style of thinking is the stories that make up Drown (1996)," by the Dominican-born and New Jersey-raised Pulitzer Prize- winning author Junot Dfaz. The critical attention Dfaz's Drown acquired right from the start continues with the publication of his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), for which he earns the Pulitzer Prize and in which he continues some of the themes and concerns he had initially played with in his short stories. It would not be exaggerating to call Dfaz's work canonical-earning this status through the fact that it is constantly referred to over the past decade of criticism on Dominican lit- · erature written in English in the United States. It works, in that literature, in opposition to a certain more celebratory strain that can be found in the . works of other important Dominican-American literary figures such as, in A How-To Guide to Building a Boy 1~ particular, Julia Alvarez. Marisel Moreno suggested this very circumstance with regard to· the positioning of Dfaz's work within the corpus of U.S. Latino/a literature when she noted a few years ago that "The recognition of Dfaz as part of the U.S. literary landscape ... constitutes a significant step towards the integration of Dominican literature into both the American mainstream and the U.S. Latino literature canons." 7 Following the critical attention directed at Diaz's Pulitzer-winning novel, we can perhaps state that Dominican literature written in English can no longer be categorized absolutely as a "marginal literature"; Moreno is right to suggest that Diaz's work brings a new level of visibility to these narratives while also articulat- ing an understanding of what immigration means to many Dominicans, who even in their places of origin often confronted an official discourse that excluded them. Like Alvarez, Diaz's writing reflects the generational dif- ferences and concerns of Dominican immigrants residing in urban spaces in the United States who face different challenges in the era of identity as they attempt to find some niche in their new surroundings. But there are major differences between these two canonical authors and they relate to the "type" of immigration experiences they depict and the type of identities their characters assume as a result of these because "they each represent a distinct type of Dominican exile, political and economic, respectively."x In Diaz's stories particular emphasis is placed on the multiple-layered experi- ences harbored in the notion of immigration. However, what is critically interesting from my point of view is the muting of the nomad in Alvarez's work, the lack of an emphasis on traveling through realms of alternate experiences simply by existing as a Dominican. Alvarez's works in poetry, short stories, and novels have gravitated to the effects of the Trujillo dic- tatorship on a certain subgroup of middle- and upper-class Dominicans, which haunts the immigration experiences and acculturation processes her characters undergo in the United States and shapes their nostalgia for a lost socioeconomic status.9 In contrast, the immigrant motivations of Junot Diaz's characters are uniformly triggered by the larger economic effect of Trujillo and post-Trujillo policies in the Dominican Republic. Diaz's char- acters come from families who are well acquainted with poverty, and they move to the United States carrying with them issues of race, sexuality, and gender that formed part of a complex back in the Dominican Republic and form one in the United States as well. These are the conditions that affect their daily life in the communities they craft while in New York City and New Jersey. As a demographic fact, the Dominican diaspora has mainly clustered in urban areas in the United States even if the background of many of the immigrants goes back to rural areas in the Dominican Republic. This is another of the violent ruptures that immigration has brought as migrants navigate oppressive political situations (legacies of U.S. imperialism and the Trujillo regime) and attempt to find the correct mix of 'authentic' and assimilative attitudes within the United States. As a result, the usual 118 Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature diasporic subject? Is it a form of induction into a larger narrative one has no part in creating? Do the territorial borders defining diasporic neighbor- hoods and homes independently shape the new social realities one faces in the diaspora, or are these territorial borders themselves established as the unconscious prolongation of the regime of repressed emotions that was formed elsewhere, back in the supposed place of origin? And does origin always stretch backwards into myth? Nietzsche, in the Uses and Disad- vantages of History for Life,1 codified a rebellion against the nineteenth- century orthodoxies of memory and history by asking whether history is not, indeed, the institutional correlate of a disease or wound-of the scars that mark the body and, by extension, mark off territories. Foucault, interpreting this essay in "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History," writes that Nietzsche saw as a sort of illness the compulsion, within Western culture, to return again and again to a "suprahistorical perspective: