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From the novela de la caña to Junot Díaz's 'cake-eater': World-Literature, the World Food System and the Dominican Republic

Oloff, K.

From the novela de la caña to Junot Díaz's 'cake-eater': World-Literature, the World Food System and the Dominican Republic Thumbnail


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Abstract

Significant changes occurred from the 1870s onwards, which laid the foundations for today's highly uneven, globalized world-food-system. It is in this context that Dominican and Dominican-American literary aesthetics are particularly revealing, as they register the impact of the rapid integration of the Dominican Republic into the world market through the sugar industry. As I argue, while the political ecology fuelling the foundational romance Enriquillo by Manuel de Jesús Galván (1882) is consciously repressed in the service of producing a national fantasy, the “critical irrealist” aesthetics of Ramón Marrero Arristy's Over (1939) possess at least some disruptive potential. It is in this context that Junot Díaz's insistent focus on style, genre and aesthetics take on their full significance, placing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) at the vanguard of thinking around the “worlding” of literary studies as well as about the role of cultural production in what Jason W. Moore calls the capitalist “world-ecology.”

Citation

Oloff, K. (2019). From the novela de la caña to Junot Díaz's 'cake-eater': World-Literature, the World Food System and the Dominican Republic. Atlantic Studies, 16(1), 90-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.1410760

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 2, 2017
Online Publication Date Jan 20, 2019
Publication Date 2019
Deposit Date Sep 6, 2016
Publicly Available Date Jul 20, 2020
Journal Atlantic Studies: Literary, Historical and Cultural Perspectives
Print ISSN 1478-8810
Electronic ISSN 1740-4649
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 16
Issue 1
Pages 90-107
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.1410760

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