“Under the Skirt of Liberty”: Giannina Braschi Rewrites Empire

Abstract

“‘Under the Skirt of Liberty’ : Giannina Braschi Rewrites Empire” traces the inscription of New York City in a tradition of male anti-imperial, subaltern, or divergently modern, broadly Latino discourses that identify the city as a space of gender and sexual dysfunction, and analyzes the work of contemporary New York Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi as representative of the ways that contemporary Latino authors have rewritten and redeployed this tradition since the 1980s. The essay identifies a representative evolution in Braschi’s oeuvre from a 1980s and 1990s performative poetics of inversion to a current rhyzomatic poetics of deterritorialization, singularity, and appositional, horizontal camaraderie “from below” that resonates with the work on resistance to empire of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Zapatista political practice, as analyzed by Neil Harvey.