ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) to explore the ways in which the voices of comics critique the experience of diaspora. Situating its analysis with respect to, on the one hand, the surreal comics of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and André Breton and, on the other hand, the superhero comics of the Second World War, it goes on to consider the mutations and manipulations of voice as it moves among varied modes of comic creation, performative speech, and technological mediations. By illustrating how Chabon and Díaz metafictively assert comic book tropes and vocal techniques, it uncovers the imaginative discourses, visual codes, and embodied languages that allow readers of their novels an “alternative route,” in Paul Gilroy’s terms, to conceive of the voices of diaspora. In this, both writers recognize the silenced voices of diaspora—Chabon through the voices of Nazi Germany and Díaz through Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. Haunting and being haunted by the medium across which a writer tells, they emphasize the historical poiesis of comic books as a means to move across interpretive worlds to decolonize diasporic history.
