The Brief Wondrous Cancellation of Junot Díaz

In 2018, multiple women accused Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz of inappropriate advances and misogynistic behavior.

Díaz’s employers at MIT, where he taught writing, and the Boston Review, where he served as fiction editor, investigated the allegations. They decided to keep him on.

Since then, The New Yorker has published his short stories. The New York Times has published his book reviews and he recently contributed a travel essay to the Wall Street Journal. He’s no longer on the masthead of the Boston Review, but remains listed as faculty at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. Last year, The New York Times named The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to its list of the 100 best books of the 21^stcentury. Last month, Kirkus Reviews did the same. Next year, Chicago’s Goodman Theater hosts the premiere of a stage adaptation of the novel.

So it was with interest and no small bit of confusion that I read Rafael Walker’s April 15 opinion column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled Junot Díaz’s Forced Disappearing Act. Walker, an assistant professor at Baruch College-CUNY, argues that editors’ recent removal of a Díaz short story from the Norton Anthology of World Literature was cancellation, “not just informally, but in a final, official way.”

Walker, who nevertheless was able to locate a PDF of Díaz’s story to share with his students, deemed the Norton editors’ move “virtue signaling” that made them “scarcely better than the right-wing book banners we revile.” Díaz shared the column on his Facebook page, posting as a preface that “this type of injustice I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

Walker certainly has the right to be bummed that editors have replaced Díaz in the anthology. And naturally Díaz isn’t pleased about impacts to his career.

But it’s a stretch to argue that removal from an anthology constitutes cancellation of someone who retains a faculty position at an elite university, writes for national publications, and has had their Pulitzer Prize-winning novel named to two best-of-the-century lists in the last year. Curation is not cancellation, and the Norton Anthology of World Literature is not preventing anyone from accessing Díaz’s work.

Walker notes in his piece that he isn’t trying to vindicate Díaz before setting out to cast doubt on the accusers. He cites the MIT and Boston Review investigations that, like football referees on the field, said there wasn’t enough evidence to change course. Left unmentioned is the resignation of three Boston Review poetry editors over the decision to retain Díaz as fiction editor. Walker charges that the #MeToo allegations involving an author of color were too easy to believe, citing an open letter from female academics that blasted “sensational” media coverage of the accusations but also clearly stated they did not intend to dismiss the allegations nor invalidate the negative and disturbing effects of harassment.

Walker isn’t the first to revisit the controversy’s impact on Díaz’s career. A 2022 Semafor column quoted Díaz comparing himself to a rabbit in Richard Adams’ Watership Down, caught in a “cultural, socio-political snare. The more you fight to escape it the more it chokes you.” Former Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez called the piece “a sparkling example of how not to write about sexual misconduct allegations” in a viral multi-post thread on X that included comments from other accusers and Díaz’s shifting statements about what happened. (The Post fired Sonmez earlier that year after she publicly called out a colleague’s retweet of a sexist joke.)

To say that Díaz has somehow been erased from our collective consciousness is objectively untrue. Is he facing the consequences of his actions? Maybe. But left out of this public hand-wringing is the impact on his accusers, writers and academics who simply don’t have the name recognition or reach that he does.

I wish we were paying half as much attention to a redemption tour for #MeToo as there’s been for this one writer.