American Studies awards Giannina Braschi the Angela Davis Prize for inspiring activism as a public intellectual, poet, and philosopher.
“We are honored to award the Angela Y. Davis Prize to Giannina Braschi. Recognized as one of today’s foremost experimental Latinx authors, Giannina Braschi is an independent scholar and writer whose novels and epic projects illuminate new imaginaries, modes of expression, and philosophical structures that urge readers to think beyond the what is to the what could be.
Braschi’s creative body of work spans more than 40 years. Her experimental epic poem El imperio de los sueños (published in 1988) is described by cultural critics Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé as “offending the male anti-imperialist high modernist poetic traditions”, bringing together poetry, prose, and drama and “mapping alternative anticolonial and decentered subjectivities”. Cultural critic Jean Franco praised Braschi’s translingual novel Yo-Yo Boing! (published in 1998) as “The best demonstration yet of Braschi’s extraordinary virtuosity, her command of many different registers, her dizzying ability to switch between English and Spanish. It’s a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, arts, the Academy, sex, memory, and everyday life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.” In United States of Banana published in (2011), Braschi once again exceeds the limits of literary analysis. The work proposes, as cultural critic Maritza Stanchich notes, “a poetics of protest across global and local context” as US global hegemonies decline post-9/11. As the United States has fast become the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world—and as its colony Puerto Rico faces a historical crisis only deepening under local annexationist leadership—Braschi is a political activist who continues to advocate for Puerto Rican sovereignty and liberation in all forms.
In the late 1990s, she participated in the successful protests to end the US Navy military exercises, including bombing exercises, in Vieques, Puerto Rico alongside a host of diasporic artists and politicians. During the summer of 2019, Braschi was among the first major cultural leaders to lead protests in the streets of San Juan against then-governor of Puerto Rico Ricardo Rossello who resigned amidst public outcry over multiple corruption scandals in his administration and the publication of thousands of racist, homophobic, and misogynist text messages exchanged between the governor and his advisors.
Braschi writes of the human flow of mass migrations, mass incarceration, democracy, liberty, and creativity. Her work has been widely adapted into other artistic forms that promote a free and sovereign Puerto Rico, such as a chamber music piece by Boricua composer Gabriel E. Bouche Caro. It has also inspired work in photography, sculpture, theater, architecture, graphic novel, and ecological urbanistic design. The scale and the range of these works speak to the impact, significance, and central influence of Braschi’s literary voice and artistic practices on others who engage with questions of language, transculturalism, anticolonial liberation, and resilience in the face of cascading disasters including colonialism, ecological crisis, and authoritarianism.
Braschi’s most recent work PUTINOIKA (published this year), set amidst contemporary US political crises, insists that poets, philosophers, and lovers have the capacity to create on a greater scale than society’s capacity to destroy. In the words of literary historian Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús this epic tragicomedy forces leaders to ‘confront the terror that happens in the void where nothing works (Braschi)’ in order to imagine a future other than the eternal return of the same’. Giannina Braschi is exceptionally deserving of the Angela Y Davis prize, and we are honored to recognize her tremendous contributions with this award.”
American Studies Awards 2024 Angela Y. Davis Prize
ASA Honoree Giannina Braschi
American Studies Association Annual Meeting
Baltimore: November 14, 2024
American Studies Association Leadership
President: Alex Lubin, Penn State University
President-Elect: Tanisha C. Ford, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Past President: Mishuana Goeman, University at Buffalo
Editor of American Quarterly: Jason Ruiz, University of Notre Dame