This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/ and the genres of science fiction and fantasy, which number among this decidedly mainstream novel's most important subjects. While the growing fields of contemporary Dominican scholarship, media, and literature have gradually deconstructed and adapted the tíguere within critical, queer, gender-inclusive, racially conscious, and transatlantic methodologies, in doing so it has also played a role in reinscribing the tíguere’s place in Dominican culture, both at home on the island and across oceans. This article does not pretend to be an exhaustive study but rather shows some of the ways in which authors and academics have spotted and studied tígueres in the milieu of Dominican cultural production. While academic books and articles on Dominican culture vary insofar as their discussions of the origins of the term and to whom it applies (whether they be men or women “straight” or queer black, white, or mixed), they also show continuity in reinforcing the basic characteristics of tigueraje (wit, grit, and resourcefulness cunning, confidence, and showmanship stoicism, style, and fierce determination) as expressions of dominicanidad, or Dominican-ness. Instead of purporting an exhaustive analysis of every utterance of tíguere in the vast archives of Dominican culture (a Quixotic affair for a single encyclopedia entry), this article observes how scholarship in the last forty years has approached the “tíguere” as a Dominican cultural expression. Phonetically, the word tíguere is a “Dominicanized” pronunciation-with one extra syllable added in the middle-of tigre, the Spanish word for tiger. This article explores evolving representations of the Dominican colloquialism and concept tíguere in academic scholarship and Dominican national and diasporic culture.

Negocios junot diaz summary