CENTRO spotlights Puerto Rican authors

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See why CENTRO spotlights Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi as “one of the most innovative writers of our time”. Read this book review by Carmen Haydée Rivera in CENTRO, VOL. XXXIV, NO. 1, SPRING 2022

Centro spotlights Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi
CENTRO spotlights Puerto Rican authors

Poets Philosophers Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi

Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer

Foreword by Ilan Stavans

Pittsburgh University Press, 2020

CENTRO reviews anthology of essays about Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi


Giannina Braschi is one of the most multifaceted and innovative diasporic Puerto Rican writers of the past decades. Her literary works, published in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, and translated into various languages have revolutionized Puerto Rican Literature, both on and off the island. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Braschi’s creative and intellectual world extends far beyond geographic, linguistic, historical, and cultural boundaries to embrace another dimension of the tangible and the imagined in her efforts to form part of a literary tradition that she constantly renews and reinvents.

Braschi’s literary production begins with verse in Spanish, reflecting her humanistic erudition and vast knowledge of literature, art, philosophy, and world history that feeds into her poetic imagery. Her poetry collection, El imperio de los sueños, published in 1988 coalesces previous collections (Asalto al tiempo, La comedia profana, and El imperio de los sueños). In 1994, the work was translated into English by Tess O’Dwyer. The University of Puerto Rico Press released a new edition in 2000, with an introduction by UPR professor and philosopher Francisco José Ramos.

Braschi moved on to hybrid narrative experimentation, developed through the juxtaposition of genres (fiction, poetry, drama) and languages (Spanish and English) that defy and problematize narratological categorization in her work titled Yo-Yo Boing!, published by Latin American Literary Review in 1998. She later followed up with a publication full of multiple narrative voices and characters that traverse historical eras and literary movements in an attempt to unravel life’s significance within a transnational lens and postmodern perspective in United States of Banana (2011). In the same year of this publication, Amazon Crossing for World Literature also issued a collected works version of Braschi’s writing that included Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana. In 2021, a version of United States of Banana appeared as a graphic novel, illustrated by Joakim Lindengren and published by The Ohio State University Press.

Apart from her publications, Braschi has taught creative writing at various universities, including Rutgers University—New Brunswick, CUNY, and Colgate University. She has also participated in translation and writing seminars in France and Sweden, in addition to her engagement as writer-in-residence in the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators. Her prestigious awards and recognitions have come from varied sources: the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ford Foundation, PEN American Center, Peter S. Reed Foundation/InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, among others.

What we witness in Braschi is an artist that moves beyond the tradition- al im/migrant story in search of the American Dream, though the American Dream looms large in her writing. Her work reveals characterizations that constantly question the imposition of ideologies that obstruct an individual’s realization and prevents them from experiencing their inalienable rights. Reading Braschi requires a reconceptualization of literary creativity and a realization of the power of a writer who instigates constant scrutiny of preconceived notions of identity, culture, tradition, and language. Her works are not passive reading but, rather, interactive and unsettling. To follow her multiple fluctuations between narrative voices, settings, ideologies, and philosophies results in a fascinating yet complex task. Seeing her in person and hearing her conferences on the process of literary creation and its significance in her life is to contemplate an artist who accepts her fragility and, simultaneously, embraces the need to express her ideas and convictions as freely and authentically as possible. Her use of dual languages and integration of multicultural experiences showcase her heterogeneous creative mindset and a play on words that is at once instinctive, casual, revealing, and a clear display of the contemporaneity of the creative process of one of the most innovative writers of our time.

Essential Resources for Braschi Studies and Latinx literature
Centro spotlights Puerto Rican author

It comes as no surprise that critical-theoretical approaches to Braschi’s work thus must follow. One of the most recent is the collection titled Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writing of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (2020), under the Latinx and Latin American Profiles series. To date, this is one of the most comprehensive and critically engaging publications that covers the breadth and scope of Braschi’s literary production. A very brief preface by writer and critic Ilan Stavans opens the collection with a reflective rendition of one of his favorite quotes by Braschi, an “ode to ambiguity,” that Stavans renders through his own use of strategic bilingual interplay. Aldama’s concise and critically informative Introduction follows, situating Braschi’s work within a comparative literary framework vis-à-vis other American, Latin American, and European writers with whom he sees Braschi conversing, while highlighting innovative approaches to the main thematic concerns in her major works. In addition to including brief summaries of the essays contained in the collection, Aldama also provides suggested further readings to contextualize Braschi’s literary production.

The volume is then subdivided into three parts, with four to five critical articles included in each part. “Vanguard Forms and Latinx Sensibilities” leads the discussion in Part I, with authors such as Madelena Gonzalez, John Rio Riofrio, Anne Ashbaugh, Francisco Moreno Fernández, and Maritza Stanchich commenting on varied topics that focus on Braschi’s narratives, identities, and worldviews. The authors in this section critically assess Braschi’s works and propose innovative interpretations of her writing that highlight topics such as poetry as resistance to cultural commodification, bilingual and translingual practices, breaking aesthetic schemas, dialogues with ancient prophets in the articulation of autonomy and freedom, translanguaging deployments, hemispheric American Latinx experiences, and new literary traditions as “global poetics of dissent.”

Part II, “Persuasive Art of Dramatic Voices,” displays critical discussions by Cristina Garrigós, Laura R. Loustau Anias, Elizabeth Lowry, and Daniela Daniele on the polyphony of voices, rhetoric, identification, and symbolic representation that Braschi uses to move her audiences with cognitive reasoning, but also with emotion, that often produce a conflation between author and narrative voice, creating a type of “poet/artist, poet/reader dyad” within a cross-genre aesthetic that defies literary classifications and conventions. The post-traumatic, 9/11 global scene; subalternities, invisibilities, and the silencing of Puerto Rico, and Latinos, in general; the avant-guard art making tradition; and the brutalities of US imperialism are also topics explored and confronted in these essays.

Part III, “Intermedial Poetics and Radical Thinking,” rounds up the last section of this volume and brings together the critical analyses of Dorian Lugo Beltrán, Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Francisco José Ramos, and an interview by Rolando Pérez. Topics deployed in this section include how Braschi’s use of hybridized genres allows for other artistic representations of her works, such as graphic novel adaptations and slam poetry performances, among others, that create inter- and intra-textual references that move beyond the notions of in-betweenness. Other focuses include Braschi’s common ground and worldviews with European philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida); politics and political satire; the sovereign self; the society of the spectacle; capitalism and its neoliberalist tenets, and how, according to Francisco José Ramos, Braschi takes literature to “the limits of its possibilities.” This section ends with Rolando Pérez’s poignant and incisive, yet ultimately emotional interview that allows Braschi to soar through her kaleidoscopic literary development and career while showcasing her aesthetics and deep convictions.

Giannina Braschi’s multimodal texts stretch the boundaries of nationalist discourses, of genres and disciplinary studies in ways that continue to astonish reading audiences and invigorate contemporary literature. Her works offer unprecedented opportunities for intercultural and transdisciplinary studies that critically examine intersectionalities, multidimensional literary schemes, and shifting linguistic codes as well as the rich array of literary output that revolving-door migration produces. This collection of essays, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer, perfectly aligns with Braschi’s literary proposals and aesthetics by providing a variety of critical voices and commentary on her work that help contextualize and further comprehend the important legacy of Braschi’s incomparable genius and craft.

Carmen Haydée Rivera
CENTRO

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Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Centro spotlights Puerto Rican autho
Centro spotlights Puerto Rican author

Back to the Future: The Implications of Balzac One Hundred Years Later

The year 2022 marks the centennial of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Balzac v. People of Porto Rico, one of the most consequential Supreme Court rulings that shaped the status of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans within the US empire. Balzac affirmed the federal government’s power to rule Puerto Rico and its residents separately and unequally within the US polity. This special issue of CENTRO Journal collects several articles about this monumentally important judicial precedent and its continuous presence in the most important and populated colony remaining in the world. The articles presented help us understand the enduring continuities and discontinuities of the application of the doctrine of territorial non-incorporation to Puerto Rico, a possession inhabited by US citizens. The collection examines different dimensions of the legacy and continued impact of Balzac and it captures many of the complexities of this century of colonialism by judicial decree. 


Guest Editors: Charles R. Venator-Santiago and José Javier Colón Morera

Essays by Puerto Rican Authors: Literature, Culture, and Politics

  • INTRODUCTION: Back to the future: The Implications of Balzac One Hundred Years Later – Charles R. Venator-Santiago and José Javier Colón Morera
  • The Sword of Libel: Jesús María Balsac and The Quest for Equality – Francisco Ortiz Santini
  • The ‘New’ Insular Cases and the Territorial Clause: From Temporary Incorporation to Permanent Un-incorporation – Jorge M. Farinacci Fernós
  • Balzac v. People of Porto Rico and the Problem of the Liberal Narrative of Citizenship, Why Puerto Ricans are Not Second-Class Citizens Today – Charles R. Venator-Santiago
  • Balzac, US Citizenship and Territorial Incorporation in Puerto Rico – Edgardo Meléndez
  • Balzac v. Porto Rico: Dead Letter after Ramos v. Louisiana? – Joel A. Cosme Morales
  • The Undying Dead: Why a Century after Balzac v. Porto Rico the Insular Cases Are as Important as Ever – Bartholomew Sparrow
  • Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans/“Puerto Ricans without Puerto Rico”: A Comment on Balzac versus Porto Rico, A Hundred Years Later – Madeline Román

Acquire this special issue of CENTRO @ centropr.hunter.cuny.edu

Centro spotlights Puerto Rican author

Centro spotlights Puerto Rican author