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This thesis examines how Junot Díaz creates and constructs his literary alter-ego and narrator, Yunior de las Casas, and examines the Social and cultural aspects, such as race, ethnicity, and gender, that condition or influence Yunior’s construction. I argue that Díaz uses the short story as a subversive genre and modernist narrative techniques, such as shifts in space-time and focalization, to reflect Yunior’s diasporic, fragmented subjectivity. My analysis includes narratological and generic readings of Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, with a brief look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, paying particular attention to Yunior as narrator. Finally, this thesis traces Yunior’s construction and development through Junot Díaz’s narratives, and this mapping of Yunior’s identity explores race, ethnicity, masculinity, and gender as it relates to heteronormative dominicanidad.

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 traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.

In this dissertation, I locate contemporary articulations of afrofeminismo in manifold modes of cultural production including literature, music, visual displays of the body, and digital media. As a point of departure, I examine the development of afrofeminismo in relation to colonial sexual violence in sugar-based economies to explain how colonial dynamics inflect ideologies of blanqueamiento/embranquecimento (racial whitening) and pseudo-scientific racial determinism. In this context, I address representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the mulata (mulatto woman) in Caribbean and Brazilian cultural discourse. Specifically, I analyze how the discourses around, as well as by, these figures contribute(d) to the (trans)formation of national identities in former slave societies. I subsequently situate afrofeminista epistemology among interrelated transnational discourses of Afro-diasporic female subjectivity. My study brings into focus three geographic areas of concentration. These areas include the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic), Brazil and the diasporic Caribbean communities of the United States. Within these geographic areas, I have identified three dynamic contemporary sites of afrofeminista expression that revise and (re)envision blackness and womanhood in the Latin American and U.S. Latino cultural imaginaries. I posit these arenas as cross-cultural contact zones where symbolic and material expressions of ethno-racial identity and resistance expand third-wave African-American black feminist theory. Yet, afrofeministas also reveal nuanced racialized, gendered subjectivities in response to highly-specific socio-economic and political conditions. My research thus explores the various social, cultural and political mechanisms inextricably linked to the articulation of race, gender, and identity within those Latin American nations who share strong ideological ties to the construct of racial democracy. Furthermore, extrapolating from the Latin American context, I address the porous and highly conflictive networks of racial and national identity emerging from the multiply-positioned subjects of Caribbean diasporic communities in the United States. I argue that afrofeminismo generated organically within Latin American and U.S. Latino revisionist artistic spaces problematizes the idea of mestizaje (racial miscegenation) as a unifying agent of nationalism. Through cultural media, afrofeministas (re)imagine transatlantic slavery as a shared historical memory connecting African women and their descendants through collective structural and psychological conditions.

The rise of Latino/a literature in the US has been fraught with difficulties that stem from matters of publication and audience. These difficulties, such as the often limited expectations publishers have for the forms Latino/a literature may take, have resulted in significant constraints on the development of this literary tradition. Despite these constraints, Latino/a authors have steadily worked to expand audience expectations by attending to narrative design and creating challenging reading situations—moments in which audiences are not only presented with a cognitively-challenging reading experience, but are also challenged to broaden its understanding of the forms Latino/a literature may take. Rather than compose their narratives with an actual audience in mind, many Latino/a authors sought to write for an ideal audience capable of engaging with even the most complex storyworlds. In essence, Latino/a authors, through their writings, invited actual audiences to break from their narrow expectations. My selected Latino/a texts reveal the narrative strategies used to challenge audiences, and also demonstrate how these challenges were received by actual audiences. "Hospitable Imaginations: Contemporary Latino/a Literature and the Pursuit of a Readership" explores how challenging reading situations have shaped Latino/a literature over the course of its development. I contend that early in the publication history of Latino fiction, publishers insisted on Latino/a writers foregrounding what were thought to be narrative modes and thematics endemic to Latinos themselves, while in more recent years publishers have placed more of a premium on immersive storytelling—on the telling of stories that have the power to capture, and retain, the imaginations of the broadest possible readership. Focusing on Latino/a texts written from the late 1960s to the present, I show how authors such as Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, Piri Thomas, Giannina Braschi, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Gilbert Hernandez have worked to create a sophisticated readership through narrative features such as consciousness representation, bilingualism, code-switching, serialization, and intertextual/paratextual play.

Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.