Digital horizons of marginalia: Annotating Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao

In my presentation, I imagine the digital futures of US Latino/a writing, particularly in terms of how the shift from print to digital might be shaping market aesthetics in new and unexpected ways. The paradox of globalization, with the mixed blessing of global access paired with commodification, of community with marginalization, finds its parallel in the digital world of the internet. The internet is neither here nor there, an abstraction that circulates material goods, a marketplace of ideas and products, and space for public discourse that is not necessarily accessible to the entire public. This digital present is already informing the market aesthetics of US Latino/a historical fiction, with online readership communities producing expansive sets of metadata. Such metadata includes book cover images uploaded by readers as well as online annotations of literary texts. In order to think through how digital reception is influencing such writing, I analyze the annotated reference website created for Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao and Díaz’s subsequent contribution to another online annotation project for his novel. While my discussion of these digital encounters between text and audience hopefully points to some new directions for the analysis of market aesthetics, I am equally invested in how US Latino/a writing can speak back to the field of the digital humanities. For example, how these creative experiments can illuminate the potential and pitfalls heralded by the digital age of literature, revisiting the questions of intimacy, access and literacy that animate my own research.