Spanish Studies, Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures (FLCL), Division of Languages and Literature, and Dean of the College Present

Big Chop: Race, Trauma, and Refusal in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Shenny De Los Angeles’ “The Ritual to Beauty”

In Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola explores her contentious relationship with her mother, childhood trauma, and racial identity through hair. Similarly, Shenny De Los Angeles’ autobiographical documentary short “The Ritual to Beauty” explores themes of race, gender, and haircare through intimate interviews with Shenny’s mother and grandmother. These women turn to haircare as a site of expression to address the trauma they and the women before them have endured. In critical moments of release, both Lola and Shenny shave their heads in complete refusal of the Dominican aesthetics of race that promote hair straightening. In a Dominican context, the “Big Chop”—as this is often referred to in anglophone cultures—conjures a negative affect that mirrors the traumatic memory of El Corte, or The Parsley Massacre (1937), when tens of thousands of Haitians were slaughtered at the hands of Dominican armed forces. The works explored here confront the racial terror of the corte to heal generational trauma rooted in an anti-Black aesthetic imaginary. Through literature and visual media, this talk explores the nuances and consequences of the “chop” as an act of aesthetic refusal and an affirmation of Dominican Blackness.

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Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese with a graduate minor in Latina/o Studies. Her interdisciplinary work centers expressions of gender, race, and sexuality through performance in contemporary Dominican and diasporic Dominican literary, artistic, and musical cultures. While at Illinois, she had the pleasure of designing and facilitating language, literature, culture, and media studies courses at several levels of instruction while also serving as a Graduate College Fellow and a Humanities Research Institute Predoctoral Fellow. Her teaching and research interests aim to center the cultural and literary production of marginalized voices across the Hispanophone Caribbean and its US diaspora. Her current work Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines the conflicting affects of the Dominican hair salon and how Dominican hair culture is reproduced and reimagined in music, literature, and art.

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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