Braschi's work is situated in the Latino
avant-garde, a "burgeoning body of work that testifies to
Latino writers’ abiding interest in the avant-garde as a means for engaging ideas of material, social relevance". Her writings are also placed within the fields of
Postcolonial,
Postmodern, and
Nuyorican literatures, as well as Latino political philosophy.
Spanish: El Imperio de los sueños In the 1980s, Braschi wrote dramatic poetry in Spanish prose in New York City. Her postmodern poetry titles were published in Barcelona, Spain, including:
Asalto al tiempo (Assault on Time, 1980),
La Comedia profana (Profane Comedy, 1985), and
El Imperio de los sueños (
Empire of Dreams, 1988). New York City is the site and subject of much of her poetry. In a climactic episode of Braschi's
Empire of Dreams, "
Pastoral or the Inquisition of Memories", shepherds invade
5th Avenue during the
Puerto Rican Day Parade and take over the City of New York; the shepherds ring the bells of
St. Patrick's Cathedral, and seize the observation deck of the
Empire State Building. Immigrant characters play the role of other characters, swapping names, genders, personal histories, and identities.
Alicia Ostriker situates her gender-bending and genre-blending poetry as having a "sheer erotic energy that defies definition and dogma."
Spanglish: Yo-Yo Boing! She published the first full-length
Spanglish novel
Yo-Yo Boing! in 1998.
Yo-Yo Boing! explores "the lived experiences of urban life for Hispanics, as in the case with New York City, and her principal interest is in representing how individuals move in and out of different cultural coordinates, including one so crucial as language." The book was written in an era of renewed calls for English-only laws,
ethnic cleansing campaigns, and
corporate censorship. "For decades,
Dominican and
Puerto Rican authors have carried out a linguistic revolution", noted
The Boston Globe, "and Giannina Braschi, especially in her novel
Yo-Yo Boing!, testify to it".
English: United States of Banana Braschi published the geopolitical comic-tragedy
United States of Banana, her first book written entirely in English, in 2011. It is a
postmodern cross-genre work that opens with the collapse of the World Trade Center on
9/11. Subjects include
immigration,
mass incarceration,
financial terrorism, colonial debt structures, and "power imbalances within the Americas." Braschi stated in
Evergreen Review that she considered herself "more French than
Beckett,
Picasso and
Gertrude Stein", and identifies as the "granddaughter of
Alfred Jarry and
Antonin Artaud, bastard child of
Samuel Beckett and
James Joyce, half-sister to
Heiner Müller, kissing cousin of
Tadeusz Kantor, and lover of Witkiewicz".
English: Putinoika, a Modern Bacchae Braschi's epic tragicomedy
Putinoika (Brown Ink, Flowersong, 2024) deals with frenzy and plague in the Putin and Trump era. The mixed-genre work is based on the ancient Greek tragedy
Bacchae by
Euripides. The political satire unfolds in three parts: Palinode, Bacchae, and Putinoika. Themes include delusion, collusion, pollution. There is a vast array of historical, mythic, and contemporary political characters spanning Antigone, Electra, Dionysus, Mari Callas, El Greco, Greta Thurnberg, Nancy Pelosi, Melania, Ivanka, Pendejo. There are also sets of humorous characters or literary choruses such as the Muses of Bacchus, the Agents of Pendejo, the Putinas of Putin, the Maenads, Doubles of Trump. Ending with a mediation of creativity and the creation of a new genre, the work has received critical praise from poets and scholars such as
Forrest Gander,
Carmen Boullosa, Miguel-Angel Zapata, and Elidio La Torre-Lagares, among others. ==Adaptations and translations==