Caribbean Philosophy Now. Contemporary Caribbean Tragicomedy. Epic tragicomedies Today.
Pratt Presents Giannina Braschi
GIANNINA BRASCHI READS PUTINOIKA
Pratt Institute
November 11 2025
INTRODUCTION BY MÓNICA-RAMÓN RÍOS
What can literature do in these dark times? In what new forms can our tongues move to a sound that gives hope?
I paraphrase, adopt, adapt, and transform one of José Esteban Muñoz’s propositions reminding us that literature and art can serve as blueprints for the communities of tomorrow. In other words, there is hope on the horizon. Yet I would add that sometimes the horizon is the abyss beneath our feet, and tomorrow is the here and now. This is what political urgency can do to literature, and literature, to us.
From Latine writers and Latin American writers––because of their positional ties as colonized––we know that literature is transformational. Its power runs parallel to the transformations enacted within the text itself. Indeed, some of the voices that shaped my own have been those radical voices that transform the way we speak, feel, and think about the meaning of the word “us”. I think about Carmen Berenguer, I’m talking about Pedro Lemebel, I’m reminded of Cristina Rivera Garza, and now I am fortunate to be here with Giannina Braschi.
The first time I knew about Giannina Braschi’s work was in a text written by Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño had the habit of falling in unrequited love in literary festivals and events. But I understand. There so many great writers who work in Spanish that it is difficult to not fall in love with those texts, those traditions, and the communities they delineate.
MÓNICA-RAMÓN RÍOS, PRATT INSTITUTE
For those of you who do not know me, I am Mónica-Ramón Ríos. I am a writer, author, and a professor here at Pratt. This semester I am teaching a lovely course in the Core Humanities called Literary and Critical Studies II, which I decided to model as an investigation into the gendered forms of crisis, or the gendered ways we respond to crisis. Also to ask, via gender and sexualities, what is a crisis? And respond with theoretical and aesthetic language.
As you can imagine, it is not casual I chose this theme in 2025.
Many of us experience crisis on a political and a societal level. Most of us experience it on a personal level as well. Holding both daily becomes a crisis in itself.
The course, which has also served as research for my current novel-in-progress, emphasizes women, femmes, and masc people in moments of crisis to assert that oppression produces material consequences—whether expressed through visible outbursts or subtle microaggressions—all of which often follow a similar script. The very fact that we have to defend our oppression, our diversity, reveals the extent of the oppression.
It is part of this gendered form of crisis that I have invited admired Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, model writer for those who need to provoke and think through crisis with humor. Humor, then, as a way to celebrate the crisis, as she told me last night over the phone.
I refer to the crisis presented in her novel Putinoika as “disasters,” drawing from Caribbean philosophy, which understands a continuity between historical racism and colonialism, political catastrophes, and natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
In Puerto Rico, the primary disaster has long been called “America,” and today many of us can recognize and empathize with that sentiment.
But out of these crises—these disasters—Giannina Braschi makes a literary party.
Giannina Braschi is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, Putinoika, was published just a year ago. For this work and for her wider corpus, she has been honored with the Angela Davis Award from the American Studies Association and the Fray de León Medal for Literature. And yet these distinctions represent only a fraction of the breadth of her achievements. At present, you might find her lecturing in Cambridge, UK, or in Rome—and today, she is here with us.
This afternoon, Giannina Braschi will read from Putinoika, which I have described as a meditation on how the poet’s language is already equipped to respond to catastrophe—and to transform it—through mouthfuls of humorous and sublime wordplay, into a manual against censorship.
She will read for about twenty minutes, perhaps a bit longer, and then we will improvise a conversation—one that I hope will include you.
Please join me in welcoming Giannina Braschi.
Caribbean Philosophy and Humor
About Chilean author Mónica-Ramón Ríos
Mónica-Ramón Ríos is a writer and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Film Studies, Screenwriting, and Gender and Sexualities at Pratt’s HMS. They are the author of novels, short stories, and genre fiction, with upcoming publications including the English translation of Alias el Rucio (Open Letter Books), the YA novel Journey to the Land of Men, and the intermedial novel Máquina Espía (Spy Machine). Their academic work focuses on the connections between literature, film, and archives in Latin America, with a particular interest in the “spectral archives” and “archives-in-assembly” of early women filmmakers and contemporary queer and trans cinemas.
Spanish Caribbean Philosopher
Giannina Braschi is an award-winning poet, novelist, and political philosopher who writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English. Her earlier masterworks include the epic poem El imperio de los sueños/Empire of Dreams, the iconic Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing!, and the geopolitical tragicomedy United States of Banana. Braschi’s new book PUTINOIKA dramatizes frenzy and plague in the Trump and Putin era as an epic tragicomedy. The U.S. Library of Congress calls Braschi “cutting-edge, influential, and even revolutionary,” and PEN America recognizes her as “one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin America today.” Her texts have been widely adapted and applied to theatre, chamber music, graphic novels, painting, photography, artist books, short films, industrial design, and urban planning. Her life’s work is the subject of the anthology of essays, Poets Philosophers Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer. Braschi’s numerous accolades include honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Danforth Foundation, Ford Foundation, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, and PEN America. She has received lifetime achievement awards from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, Cambio 16 in Spain, and her native city of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Terms frequently associated with Braschi include Postcolonial Literature, Latinx Philosophy, Postdramatic Theatre, Hysterical Realism, McOndo, and Post-Boom. She goes simply by poet.
LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS
To read a list of Latin American women philosophers click here.
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