American Studies Association 2025
Enjoy free public events hosted by American Studies Association 2025 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Nov 19-22, 2025.
ASA Public Humanities Day
Join us for Public Humanities Day on Wednesday, November 19th, at Humanidades Puerto Rico in Old San Juan.
The day, offered in conjunction with our 2025 Annual Meeting, brings together programming that celebrates the intersection of scholarship and community engagement. You’ll experience film screenings, performances, an author reading and discussion, and other curated events. Throughout Old San Juan, arts and culture organizations will open their doors to ASA members through self-guided walking tours, providing opportunities to discover and support community-based projects. The day will also include an invitation-only community of practice focused on anti-racist and anti-colonial digital archiving and public humanities work, along with a cemetery public history initiative.
Our events will take place at Humanidades Puerto Rico’s headquarters in the Cuartel de Ballajá. This building, originally constructed by the Spanish army, has been transformed into a cultural hub that champions arts and culture year-round. The space is also home to El Museo de las Américas, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española, La Oficina Estatal de Conservación Histórica, and other cultural organizations. Like state Humanities Councils across the mainland, Humanidades Puerto Rico is navigating federal funding challenges, making our collaboration particularly meaningful as we work together to showcase the importance of humanities work to diverse audiences.
Please note that space limitations require a registration process beyond standard conference registration, and that separate tickets are required for entrance to the main sessions of Public Humanities Day and the Giannina Braschi reading. We look forward to your participation in what promises to be an enriching day of public engagement and exchange!
American Studies 2025
American Studies Association (ASA), the oldest and largest scholarly association dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of U.S. culture and history, will feature iconic Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi as the Headline Event at their Annual Meeting in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico in November 2025. The theme of this year’s ASA convention is LATE-STAGE AMERICAN EMPIRE.
In celebration of Public Humanities Day on November 19th, ASA will present a special session on Braschi’s epic works Putinoika (Brown Ink, FlowerSong) and United States of Banana (Latinographix), which provide an unflinching look at Late-Stage American Empire.
The special event entitled “RADICAL IMAGINATION AND THE TRANSCOLONIAL CONDITION: GIANNINA BRASCHI’S LITERARY DISPOSITIFS” will features renowned scholars Carmen H. Rivera, Nuria Morgado, and Elidio La Torre Lagares in conversation with Giannina Braschi.
This session invites attendees to an intimate and thought-provoking conversation with 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, 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, 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. Attendees will engage in an open dialogue on themes such as:
• The Novel as Dispositif: How United States of Banana operates as an epistemic rupture that unsettles colonial logic and capitalist modernity
• Linguistic Insurrection and Cross-cultures: The role of multilingualism and Spanglish as forms of aesthetic and political resistance in her experience as diasporican.
• Dystopian Allegory and Liberation Narratives: How Braschi’s genre- defying approach challenges traditional understandings of citizenship, exile, and freedom.
This session is an opportunity for scholars, students, and fans of contemporary literature, political philosophy, and postcolonial studies to explore Giannina Braschi’s literary insurgency and the enduring power of the novel as a disruptive, liberatory force.