Penny Vlagopoulos, assistant professor of English at St. Lawrence University, recently had her article, “Decolonizing Food: Transgressive Eating in Junot Díaz’s Drown”, published in the Fall 2019 issue of Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory.
Vlagopoulos’ article focuses on Junot Díaz's first collection of short stories, Drown, which reflects on the experience of immigrants in the United States, something close to the heart of Díaz, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic. Vlagopoulos’ work looks at the ways that food and eating culture are intertwined throughout the narratives of the stories. Food and its consumption are used by Díaz to represent immigrants’ struggle against the pressure from American society to assimilate. Acts of eating, Vlagopoulos argues, ultimately serve as tools for decolonization.
“In moments of foreclosed or ineffectual ingestion, Drown’s attention to the imperatives of hunger—including legacies of colonialism, labor and sexual exploitation, racialization, and the fragmentations of migration—shatters any nostalgia associated with ethnic foodways and interrogates the materialist and psychic conditions that determine how and why eating matters," said Vlagopoulos.
Vlagopoulos teaches and writes on 20th- and 21st-century U.S. and global literatures. Recently, she has taught courses such as Contemporary American Literature, Literature and Globalization, Literature and Film at the Borderlands, Multi-ethnic American Literature, and American Literature from 1865 to the Present. She has published articles on a range of contemporary diasporic writers and recently coedited a collection of essays entitled Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales. Her current project examines the ethico-political stakes of hospitality in the current refugee crisis. She earned her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
