On Diasporic Identification In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz is one of the most distinguished Latino-American writers. His masterpiece The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction since it was published in 2007. Taking the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic as the background, the novel tells the stories of three generations in two families. Dominican Americans’diasporic experiences confront them with cultural conflicts and the discontinuity of history, leading to their sense of loss, insecurity, and rootlessness in the American society. This predicament forces them to find a way out, or at least to make a contribution to their living and development there. Thus, this thesis mainly explores the Dominican Americans’diasporic identities, trying to reveal its formation and influence and demonstrate the Dominican Americans’continuous endeavor to survive in the modern American society.The main body of this thesis contains three parts:Chapter One focuses on diverse diasporic experiences of the Dominican immigrants and their descendants. As the matriarch of the de Leon family, Belicia is forced to exile as a result of her defiance of the Trujillo dictatorial regime; for the second generation, Lola and Oscar lack the sense of belonging, and thus are trapped in psychological diaspora. The modes of the two generations’diaspora are different, but both demonstrate the torment befalling on the immigrants and their descendants generated by the hegemony and violence in the Trujillo and post-Trujillo eras.Chapter Two discusses the Dominican Americans’ dilemma of identification in the multicultural context. The fragmentation of history and cultural conflicts entrap them in a double marginalized predicament. Trujillo’s dictatorial rule deprives the immigrant Belicia and her descendants of their voice. Therefore, their history is replaced and even eliminated, and they become the outsiders of the Dominican history. Besides, as members of the ethnic minority, the de Leon family is marginalized in the American society so that they hold a strong attachment to the homeland, which causes their psychological displacement. Thus, the double marginalization entraps them in a bewilderment of identification.Chapter Three describes the Dominican Americans’diasporic identities and their gradual reconciliation of conflicts. Double marginalization signifies the hybridity of identity. For the de Leon family, this hybridity provides them with different perspectives, enabling them to reconsider their past and future, and to achieve some reconciliation on the basis of negotiation. At this point, the hybridity of identity foreshadows a possibility for the Dominican Americans to find their own position in the multicultural environment.This thesis has thoroughly investigated the diasporic identification of the Dominican Americans, pointing out that identification is closely related to the living status of the Dominican diasporans and their descendants in the multicultural environment. Searching for identification, the de Leons have encountered loss and frustration, but they also grow in a painful way:although they have to deal with the awkward situation as the outsiders of both cultures, their hybridity changes the binary antagonism between the majority and the minority, illuminating a possibility to break the silence they have suffered from and to seek for their own voice. Therefore, this novel presents the two-sided effect of diasporic identities for the Dominican Americans, and conveys the writer’s concern and belief in the Dominican diasporans’survival in the multicultural world.