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Chapter five examines the writings of Julia Alvarez and Ha Jin as examples of literary bilingual brokering in the age of global English. As writers of bi-national scope in their writings, Alvarez and Ha Jin explore a cultural politics of circulation to dislodge the assumption of an organic relationship between national language and literature. However, the coexistence of World Literature in English and US multicultural literature in these writers’ works places their representations of political oppression and human rights abuse abroad within the pedagogy of neoliberal multiculturalism at home that is geared toward an individualistic understanding of freedom and rights. Even as Alvarez and Ha Jin seek to claim belonging in the homeland of language outside the narrow confines of national literature, that choice itself is circumscribed by the cultural politics of writing in English at a time of global English hegemony.

Writing in the 1990s and 2000s about Rafael Trujillo’s reign (1930–1961), Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario reveal how the control over sexuality—and particularly over women, girls, and marginalized bodies—plays out during a dictator’s regime. Approaching this history from different angles, the writers demonstrate that the reach of the violence and predatorial sexuality modeled by Trujillo extended to affect not only individual lives and experiences, but also families and entire communities. Trujillo’s totalitarian regime was a threat to love, sexuality, and family formations, as portrayed through various characters’ experiences, from the real-life Mirabel sisters in Alvarez’s novel to the fictional Cabral family in Díaz’s book, as well as through the aesthetics and form of the novels. Through the formal affordances of literature, we can explore histories in a fuller way than is enabled by more official accounts.

This chapter presents a reading of Julia Alvarez’s first four novels—How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), ¡Yo! (1977b), and In the Name of Salomé (2000)—to understand how she creates a composite narrative of Dominican Republic history. She complicates the history, personal memory, and fiction in her literary construction of a Dominican Republic that is based on a transformative history of the self. By recounting the collective trauma inflicted by Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s brutal thirty-one-year dictatorship, Alvarez triangulates a national subject that attempts to resolve the contradictions of diasporic identity.

This chapter tracks material objects forward and backward through time in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents to rethink otherness as a foundational orthodoxy of postmodernism. Constructing social networks necessarily produces otherness. Postmodern fiction, as many have argued, interrogates this otherness, often elevating it as a primary element of cultural identity. But the postmodern aesthetic also valorizes the being-in-common, or the state of inclination in which actors exist in the construction process. If inclination is just as important as otherness, then postmodernism is not only interested in the negative space of difference but also in the fundamental similarity of all actors as actors. Otherness has been misunderstood as primary, when it is actually only definable in the context of the inclination of actors toward one another.

Chapter 3 extends the analysis of a developing, constructed sense of group identity around issues of the trauma of illegality by looking at fiction by Caribbean Latino/a writers. Drawing on Anthony Appiah’s explication of the notion of “partial cosmopolitanism,” the chapter argues that Caribbean-origin writers seek ways of extending a group identity so that it tentatively includes both undocumented immigrants and other groups of Latinos (such as Cubans or Puerto Ricans) who are not subjected in the same way to the conditions and risks of “illegality.” Junot Díaz’s story “Negocios” (in Drown) puts the trope of family at the center of contested versions of latinidad that might—or might not—successfully create communities of solidarity around both U.S. citizens and undocumented Latinos. Cristina García’s A Handbook to Luck and Julia Alvarez’s young adult novel Return to Sender construct an ethics of solidarity across difference that recognizes immigration status as a problem that requires an ethical response across national-origin lines.

Chapter four turns to a more intimate form of affiliation than either nation or community: family. The period from the 1970s onward has produced the greatest concentration of cycles since modernism, because writers embraced the cycle to express the contingency of being ethnic and American. Family, rather than community or time, is the dominant linking structure for many of these cycles, reflecting how immigration laws placed family and education above country of origin. This chapter focuses on the role of family in the production and reception of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Julie Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008). These cycles argue that subjectivity—and by extension gender and ethnic attachments—derives not only from biological relationships but also from “formative kinship,” which originates in shared experiences that the characters choose to value.