Spanning nearly two centuries, the Puerto Rican novel is a vibrant tradition shaped across languages, genres, generations, and geographies. From the archipelago to the diaspora—and from Spanish to English and Spanglish—Puerto Rican writers have turned plantations, drawing rooms, barrios, city streets, airplanes, and colonial institutions into settings for resistance, reinvention, and cultural...
This blogpost features a summary of the postcolonial novel United States of Banana excerpted from The Literary Encyclopedia. United States of Banana, Braschi’s first work written in English, rewrites “radical politics as high art” by dramatizing the collapse of the Twin Towers as a metaphor for the fall of the American empire (Gonzalez 23). Described by Library Journal as “bizarre but intriguing”...
Professor and coeditor Amy Sheeran discusses teaching United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel as an interdisciplinary work connecting Puerto Rican history, U.S. imperialism, Latinx comics, literature, visual art, and popular culture. With classroom approaches and newer scholarship from Thomas Rothe and NYU’s Latinx Project, this guide shows how Giannina Braschi and Joakim Lindengren’s political...