ABSTRACT
In this chapter I examine transnational Latino/a fiction as transmodern literature and discuss the consequences of privileging this perspective over a transnational outlook. In particular, I use Enrique Dussel’s transmodern project as a framework to analyse Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Dussel suggests that Transmodernity emerges in the liminal space between centre and peripheries; it incorporates the obliterated discourses of the peripheries into the hegemonic centre, resulting in a hybrid meta-narrative. I contend that Latino/a fiction occupies a similarly liminal space and produces discourses that are radically hybrid and thus transmodern. However, this hybrid status cannot be fully apprehended within a Western-biased episteme. In this chapter I argue that adopting a transnational perspective in order to analyse Latino/a fiction might inadvertently consolidate a Western-biased framework that undermines the subversive potential of its liminal condition. In Díaz’s novel, the rewriting of Dominican history exposes the gaps in a transnational genealogy of oppression (fukú) that is counterbalanced by peripheral discourses of resistance (zafa). The result is a palimpsest that can be best understood within the transmodern metanarrative.
