Vernacular Cosmopolitanism and the Transformation of Community in Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana

In the aftermath of 9/11, Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana (2011) envisions a world of crumbling empires, destabilized economies, and new alliances among its vulnerable subjects. While exploring the possibilities for resistance in the changing landscapes of political and economic power, Braschi focuses specifically on “the immigrant and the terrorist” (Perisic, 2019, p. 26), and examines kaleidoscopic transformations of community, which are effected by global circulations of people and capital. Formally reflected by Braschi’s endless experimentation with genre, what she repeatedly calls foreign-speaking English, structure, plot, and character, such transformations involve “the cosmopolitanization of reality” (Beck, 2006, p. 18) and the formation of what Homi Bhabha has termed vernacular cosmopolitanism, which is born marginal, on the border and in between, as cosmopolitanism of the underprivileged. Relying on a rich body of interdisciplinary theory on migration and cosmopolitanism, this article analyses the narrative’s conceptualization of vernacular cosmopolitanism as cosmopolitanism ‘from below’, and the ongoing transformations of community that open up a space for new forms of solidarity and cooperation across difference in a time characterized by both global opportunity and global threat.