LEGENDARY PUERTO RICAN AUTHOR AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER
Meet Legendary Puerto Rican Author
A limited number of tickets are available for Public Humanities Day’s Headline Session with legendary Puerto Rican author and political philosopher Giannina Braschi (the winner of the ASA’s 2024 Angela Y. Davis Award), whose works provide a hilarious and unflinching analysis of late-stage American Empire.
The session, “Radical Imagination and the Transcolonial Condition: Giannina Braschi’s Literary Dispositifs”, features renowned scholars Cristina Garrigos, Nuria Morgado, Elidio La Torre Lagares, and Carmen H. Rivera in conversation with the iconic Boricua writer. Braschi wrote the postcolonial classic “United States of Banana” about the collapse of the American Empire and the liberation of Puerto Rico—and the newly published epic “PUTINOIKA” on collusion, pollution, and delusion in the Putin and Trump era. Her radical texts have been widely applied to other artforms and fields, including the art song cycle, theater play, photography book, lithography, painting, graphic novel, cartooning, sculpture, industrial design, and urban planning theory. This special program is sure to widen perspectives not only about Puerto Rican archipelago but about American culture at large.
In celebration of Public Humanities Day, the event is free and open to the public. Registration, separate from the general registration for Public Humanities Day, is required for admittance.
Legendary Puerto Rican author and political philosopher Giannina Braschi.
https://form.jotform.com/asastaff/braschi
PUBLIC HUMANITIES DAY AT THE 2025 ANNUAL MEETING
Wednesday, November 19th at Humanidades Puerto Rico
American Studies Association 2025
RADICAL IMAGINATION AND THE
TRANSCOLONIAL CONDITION: GIANNINA BRASCHI’S
LITERARY DISPOSITIFS
This session invites attendees to an intimate and thought-provoking
conversation with Giannina Braschi, one of the most radical voices in
contemporary American and Latinx literature. Braschi’s work—spanning poetry,
the novel, and theatrical performance—defies conventional literary forms,
engaging in a transgressive critique of empire, coloniality, and capitalism. With
United States of Banana (2011), she not only reimagines Puerto Rico’s political fate
through a blend of dystopian satire, allegory, and philosophy but also deploys the
novel as dispositif—a mechanism of power, resistance, and disruption. With
Putinoika (2004), her recent work, Braschi continues this trajectory by engaging
in a trenchant critique of autocracy, war, and the ideological machinery of
authoritarianism, proving that the dispositif of literature remains a vital
instrument of resistance.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the dispositif as an
assemblage of discursive and non-discursive forces, this session will explore how
Braschi weaponizes the novel as a site where literature, history, and performative
politics collide. Her work operates beyond representation, functioning instead as
an apparatus that magnifies the paradoxes of sovereignty, the violence of
neoliberalism, and the fractures of national belonging.
keywords: legendary Puerto Rican poets, legendary Puerto Rican authors, legendary Puerto Rican artists, legendary Puerto Rican writers