The Interstitial Arts Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the study, support, and promotion of interstitial art: literature, music, visual and performance art found in between categories and genres – art that crosses borders. 
IAF’s newest project, Interfictions Zero, the rolling online anthology of interstitial criticism on interstitial texts, launched April 1 – no kidding! Our first essay author, Carlos Hernandez, says:
Hey gang, my essay “Oscar Wao: Murdering Machismo” is inaugurating Interfictions Zero, a new web anthology of essays about genre-busting literature. It’s lit. crit. by way of memoir, and it recounts the story of how, on my visit to Cuba in 1997, I was emasculated by Havana prostitutes–not once, but twice! Have a read!
We can’t do any better than that. Interfictions Zero begins over here:
http://www.interstitialarts.org/projects/interfictions0.php
Congratulations to co-editors Delia Sherman & Helen Pilinovsky for a job well begun. Next essay to appear May 1st, so watch this space! ….And remember, we’re accepting rolling submissions for IF0, so if you have an idea, please go here for Submissions Guidelines.
Want to respond to Oscar Wao: Murdering Machismo ?
We welcome your comments RIGHT HERE:
April 5th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
Enjoyed the essay very much–very thought provoking!
April 6th, 2011 at 5:30 pm
Charming, witty, funny…loved the excursion into fiction and hope there
will be many more!
April 8th, 2011 at 10:12 am
So apparently in Cuba, macho means spending money on others.
Nice evaluation of a book that I’d never heard of. Will check ‘er out.
April 8th, 2011 at 11:04 am
The essay was a blast, but I have to disagree with its conclusion that “The fukú is machismo.” I love love love this book as I haven’t loved a “literary” novel in years, but Yunior’s voice ventriloquizing Oscar is *absolutely* about having one’s cake and eating it too. Anyone who finds “Yunior’s voice merely sexist” isn’t giving Diaz enough credit, but anyone who misses that the voice is indeed “infuriatingly self-assured and macho” is ignoring that part of the appeal of this book – to the geeky literati of all colors – is that it fuses the safely nerdy world of readerliness, D&D and comic books, to an an enticingly ‘authentic’ and macho hood-speak in a manner that seems effortless but is in fact the result of astonishingly self-conscious craft.
April 9th, 2011 at 4:28 pm
I liked the article. But I think the writer enacted the very thing he was supposedly challenging by sort of exoticizing the women and his experience. Overall, his descriptions of the scene with the women at el malecon reads as the report of a native informant. Although he praises Junot Diaz’s deep irony, he didn’t plumb deep enough to understand the political tack Junot affects in his fictions and the pitfalls of hewing to close to stereotypes when not conscioulsy working to rework or undermine them.