Politics and Literature: Dictatorship in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This article explores the political dimension of Junot Díaz’s work, focusing on the figure of the dictator as depicted in the footnotes to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in an attempt to analyze his view of the “dangers of dictatorship” in both literature and politics and to prove that the political attitudes of writers influence the way their literature “does” politics. Thus, a thorough analysis of the footnotes exposes The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a story about a nerd in New Jersey “dictated” by the narrator, which is challenged by the story of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo who “dictated” the recent history of the Dominican Republic.