Junot Díaz’s Forced Disappearing Act

During my first semester at my current institution, I was slated to teach a section of one of our general-education courses on world literature. As I was photocopying the syllabus, one of my notoriously inquisitive former senior colleagues picked up and examined one of the copies. Seconds later, his eyes widened, and he exclaimed incredulously, “You’re teaching Díaz?” Knowing exactly why he was nonplussed, I launched into an explanation. Junot Díaz is a touchstone in American multiethnic literature, I protested, and has been cleared of the worst of his #MeToo-related charges. The colleague went on about his business, albeit grumblingly.

Over the years, I continued assigning Díaz’s short story in that course, and it remained a crowd-pleaser — one of the best-received readings on a syllabus that covered more of the globe than Magellan. As with all the authors I assigned, I gave a précis of Díaz’s biography, which included an overview of the scandal in which he was embroiled after several women had accused him of all manner of misconduct. This information did not diminish my students’ enjoyment of his work in the slightest.

For this course, I, like many of my colleagues, have relied on the Norton Anthology of World Literature, edited by the Harvard English professor Martin Puchner along with a host of assisting editors. I adopted the newest edition, released just last summer, and, in my haste, did not bother checking to see whether my usual, highly canonical readings had been preserved. Everything was fine until we reached Díaz, who had mysteriously disappeared from the anthology — been disappeared from it.

Whither Díaz? After scrambling to get my students a PDF of the story, I went in pursuit of answers. The editors offering none that I could find in their prefatory remarks, I emailed a higher-up at Norton whom I’m friendly with, and she confirmed what I suspected: Finding that instructors had stopped assigning Díaz after the charges surfaced, the editors decided that he had suddenly become more of a liability to the anthology than an asset.

In effect, Díaz had been canceled, not just informally but in a final, official way. Removal from an anthology is far more consequential for a writer than ephemeral, even if viral, tweets or sensational feature stories. The Norton anthologies are one of the primary channels through which we establish and preserve literary canons. Assembled by the profession’s most influential scholars, they shape what instructors pass down to the next generations and what those next generations, in turn, will view as their cultural inheritance. In expunging Díaz’s work from such a high-profile anthology, the academy was conferring its imprimatur upon a smear campaign against a once-revered author based on reliably discredited rumors. They have confirmed that ours is an era in which merely the suggestion of impropriety can cause a writer, over the course of a single edition update, to go from being hailed by the Norton editors as “one of the most distinctive voices of any Latino writing today” to having his distinctive voice entirely muted.

For the profession of literary studies — to say nothing yet of the culture at large — this is embarrassing. Rather than stewarding a canon of the best literary work produced over time for posterity, we are turning into virtue-signaling PR representatives concerned more with the morals of our authors than the merits of their work. Such an approach makes us scarcely better than the right-wing book burners we revile. While they seek to suppress texts whose content conflicts with their morality, we suppress texts whose authors’ behavior conflicts with ours. Both approaches to literature are profoundly illiberal and dangerous, inhospitable to art and thought alike.

A writer with the vision and skill to tell the story of Reagan-era Dominican immigrants through the frame of Homeric epic, Junot Díaz belongs to any responsible account of American literature — of world literature. In presenting his Spanglish-speaking, disenfranchised communities in all their complexity and without the condescendingly ethnographic lens marring much literature about nonwhite people, Díaz learned from what Toni Morrison had done for black Americans, who herself had learned from what Chinua Achebe had done for Africans. While Díaz has clearly been enabled by the past, he has also enabled a future, providing compelling models for writing about subcultures in ways that neither exoticize nor idealize them. The entry of Junot Díaz’s work into the tradition of English letters is a major literary event, and that work forms a part of what T.S. Eliot once called the “living whole” of literary history.

In other scholarly fields, it would be inconceivable to let the objects of study be determined by the probity of the historical actors involved, even if valuations of those actors shift. Would we expect a scholar of American history to omit mention of the Hayes administration because that president cravenly abandoned Reconstruction in order to win an election, canceling Hayes and ignoring the consequences of his policies? Will left-leaning economists let Trump’s litany of misdeeds prevent them from studying the effect of his tariffs? These scenarios seem ridiculous. It should seem equally so that literary historians would stop studying and teaching the work of a writer who constitutes a major node in literary history over extraliterary activity better left to journalists and perhaps the author’s therapist.

My concern here is with Díaz’s work, not with Díaz himself. I’m not out to vindicate the author, whom I’ve never met and who may very well be a jerk. However, because I am largely interested in the left’s perilous blind spots, a brief revisiting of the case would be worthwhile. We have witnessed many celebrities get felled in the #MeToo movement, but something was different about Díaz’s case. Deborah Chasman, co-editor of the Boston Review (where Díaz served as fiction editor), discussed the media frenzy in The Chronicle, noting both how under-investigated the news coverage about Díaz had been and the disproportion between the accusations leveled against Díaz and the punishment being called for. Story after story in major news outlets gleefully publicized unsubstantiated allegations about this famous author. Was it racist? “Yes,” says an open letter published in these pages and signed by many writers and academics, including Rebecca Walker. The signatories discerned in the coverage “a characterization of Díaz as a dangerous and aggressive sexual predator from whom all women must be protected,” one that “reinforces racist stereotypes that cast Blacks and Latinxs as having an animalistic sexual ‘nature.’” I would add that the readiness of the mainstream to crucify Díaz might have been the backlash for his being a successful man of color in this country — and in the overwhelmingly white world of literature, no less. Was he the victim of what Koritha Mitchell has memorably called “know-your-place aggression” — a racist phenomenon meant to clip the wings of nonwhite people who fly too high? Probably.

It was enough that Díaz was subjected to a guilty-until-proven-innocent dispensation of justice, but what’s worse — as his recent exclusion from the Norton anthology suggests — is that he couldn’t elude punishment even once his innocence had been established. Institutions he worked for, including the Boston Review and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted independent investigations of Díaz’s conduct, and none could find grounds for disciplining him. (It’s worth noting that our major news outlets proceeded with much less gusto in reporting the outcomes of these investigations than they did in initially defaming him.) Some might cite these exonerations as just another instance of institutions protecting the powerful. Such skeptics would do well to remember the cowardice of even the most elite institutions in the face of a liability. If they are willing to oust no less than their presidents over the flimsiest accusations, what chance would a mere fiction writer stand?

The ease with which literary scholars have accepted Díaz’s unjust relegation should occasion some soul-searching. I am struck by the number of people in the profession who have plastered Black Lives Matter posters all across their walls and yet looked on, some cheering, while the most accomplished Latino writer of a generation — winner of both the Pulitzer and MacArthur “Genius Grant” — has been wrongly persecuted and is being systematically erased. Meanwhile, white writers who we know to have done bad things remain in little danger of being dethroned. That T.S. Eliot was an antisemite did not stop me from quoting him above. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in addition to being a philanderer, freely admitted that his “reactions” were “racially snobbish” and that he “believe[d] at last in the white man’s burden,” but this year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby goes on with full fanfare. Don’t even get me started on Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. I’ll say aloud a truth universally known if not universally acknowledged: If we confined ourselves to teaching only virtuous writers, our syllabuses would be woefully barren.

And please know that students can see the hypocrisy underlying all this. After I explained how Díaz had been dropped from this edition of the anthology, my students this semester were appalled. One dismayed student raised her hand to say, “Wow! I can’t believe this is happening to him when there’s a convicted rapist in the White House!”

Perhaps, as they say, the kids are all right. But I am deeply concerned about the grown-ups.