EAAS2022 Wastelands Conference Program Highlights. A Centennial Celebration of T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece The Waste Land!
EAAS2022 Conference Keynote Speakers
Hybrid Event: Madrid, April 6-8, 2022.
The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. The title of the conference alludes to Eliot’s work and the main themes in it, expanding the idea of the wasteland to the study of the United States. Hence, the overarching theme of the conference is open to all kinds of reflections around the concept of “wasteland” and waste. European Association for American Studies Conference addresses the concept of waste in U.S. culture, history, and politics.
Puerto Rican poet and philosopher Giannina Braschi will be a Keynote Speaker of the European Association for American Studies Conference. On April 7, 2022, the President of EAAS Cristina Garrigos will interview Giannina Braschi on her life’s work. Braschi will also be the subject of a roundtable discussion “United States of Banana and the Dregs of Empire” organized by Amanda Mignone Smith and Amy Sheeran, co-editors of the graphic novel United States of Banana on April 8th.
EAAS2022 Wastelands Conference Program Highlights also include Plenary Speakers David E. Chinitz, Ramón del Castillo and Eulalia Piñero Gil.
EAAS2022 Wastelands Conference Program Highlights
Roundtable: United States of Banana and the Dregs of Empire
Friday, April 8, 2022, European Association for American Studies Conference
Amy Sheeran, Otterbein University
Amanda M. Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz
Madelena Gonzalez, University of Avignon
Nuria Morgado, College of Staten Island; the Graduate Center
Tess O’Dwyer, Academy of American Poets
Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana (2011) is a literary tour de force that tackles terrorism, global warning, mass incarceration, revolution, and fraternal love in the context of twenty-first century US empire. In philosophically rich prose and verse, the Puerto Rican poet lays bare the US’s insidious and sometimes lurid chokehold on Latin America with particular emphasis on the country’s grip on its last colony, Puerto Rico. Throughout Braschi’s novel, the characters encounter the dregs of empire: the material, ideological, linguistic, and psychic waste Spain and the US have produced and discarded throughout their history. The newly published graphic novel adaptation of USB further highlights the recycling and repurposing of imperial symbols and imagery. In this roundtable, scholars of Giannina Braschi’s work explore the waste and wastefulness that result from the intersection of US and Spanish imperial ambitions in Puerto Rico. Topics may include the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017) and other climate change-related events, the racism and xenophobia of the Trump presidency, the global pandemic, and the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the lasting legacy of Spain’s colonization, as well as the possibilities the novel proposes for renewal.
Roundtable Discussion Questions
- One of the most profound and challenging aspects of Braschi’s work is that it touches on so many topics at once and therefore constantly reveals itself to be relevant in new ways. We have seen, for example, how the graphic novel version of United States of Banana renews the text’s relevance for considering the Trump presidency and the US response to the devastation of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico.
- Given this year’s conference theme of Wastelands, we’d like to reflect on how Braschi sheds light on waste, as both a construct and a reality of living in a time of ecological crisis. How does Braschi engage with waste in generative and surprising ways?
- Puerto Rico has been described as “the oldest colony in the world.” How does Braschi illuminate the distinct and intersecting legacies of US and Spanish imperialism?
- Poetry is about making; in Braschi’s case, it is about making new worlds or new ways of being. Given that she does not ignore the waste accumulated throughout centuries of different forms of empire, in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, in what ways does her work imagine new worlds built on the dregs of empire? What kind of worlds are they?
- Braschi’s work has been associated with a number of fields and approaches: Latinx literature, post-9/11 literature, queer studies, science or speculative fiction, philosophy, and poetry. In United States of Banana, Braschi says that she was born after distinctions were made, but not divisions. How does Braschi’s resistance to the idea of divisions help us situate her work?
View other highlights of the EAAS2022 Wastelands Conference Program.
THE ETHICS OF WASTE
- Moral waste: deterioration of democracies and other values. Empty discourses (political, cultural, etc.).
- Wasted opportunities (land of opportunities, American dream).
- Waste as a “negative store”, as opposed to the archive; forgetting, destruction, and latent cultural memory.
- Waste of information: useless and redundant data, technology, media, etc.
WASTELANDS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
- Environmental waste (water, land, e-waste, etc.).
- Anti-Waste: degrowth philosophy.
- “Zero waste” movement and consumerism.
- Food waste.
- Wastelands as devastation of spaces.
- Waste of resources (human, natural, economic, etc.).
LITERARY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WASTELANDS
- “Wasteland” as an image of decadence, crisis, and postwar.
- Barrenness vs. fertility, hopelessness vs. regeneration.
- S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and its literary / cultural influence.
- Literary representations of wastelands.
- (Audio)visual representations of wastelands.
- Ruins, trash, in painting, music, film, and other artistic representations.