5 “Not even a sci-fi writer”: Peripheral Genres, the World-System Novel, and Junot Díaz Sharae Deckard [Pre-print draft of an essay to appear in Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Essays in Honour of Benita Parry, edited by Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma (Routledge 2018)]. Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008) is a novel that, like its protagonist, Oscar, is in love with “Genres!” (16). The multi-generational immigrant novel contrasts the short, tragic life of second-generation “ghetto nerd” Oscar with the experiences of his sister Lola and excavates the buried history that led his mother to flee the Dominican Republic to the US (336). The three interweaving timelines of the Cabral family are embedded in a frame narrative, narrated with comic brio by Yunior, another second-generation Dominican. However, this realist narrative is punctuated by non-realist tropes and analogies appropriated from speculative genres, as when Yunior first describes the dictator Trujillo: His power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn…our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. (2–3) It is precisely because Trujillo seemingly exceeds realist representation that Yunior appropriates the titles of Dark Lords from fantasy epics such as The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King, and The Chronicles of Prydain in the attempt to describe his monstrosity. Yet the