Empire of Dreams (Spanish: El imperio de los sueños, 1988) is a postmodern poetry epic by Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi, who is considered "one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin American literature today".
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Love, liberty, inspiration, immigration, gender fluidity, and creativity are the main themes of Empire of Dreams, an ode to New York City.
[10] The work is a hybrid of genres: prose poetry, drama, musical theater, manifesto, gossip, autobiography, diary, literary theory, and antinovel.
[12] The text unfolds through a series of violent and surreal[18] theatrical scenes performed by clowns, buffoons, shepherds, lead soldiers, magicians, madmen, witches, and fortune tellers.
[19] In a climactic episode of "Pastoral; or, the Inquisition of Memories", shepherds cause traffic jams on 5th Avenue during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, ring the bells of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and take over the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
The work is a mash-up of flash fiction, pop songs, tabloid, commercial, diary, and manifesto, closing with a philosophical treatise on the writer's role in the modern age.
[2] The heroine Mariquita Samper, a Macy's make-up artist who dreams of being a star, calls for a revolution of "poetic eggs" and shoots the narrator, who keeps rewriting her own diary in order to turn it into a bestseller.
The work closes with a quotation from an anonymous poem of Medieval Spanish literature, a line from "El Conde Arnaldos": "I only sing my song/to whomever follows me".
Eliot's "The Waste Land" as the single most influential English-language poem to inform the rhythmic shifts and the inspiration from which she creates a chorus of anonymous voices to capture the collective conscience of the masses.
[25] Alicia Ostriker notes in the introduction to Empire of Dreams that the poet's voice sounds decidedly "macho" and yet it can be theoretically "paired with Luisa Valenzuela, Clarice Lispector, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Marguerite Duras, and obviously she owes a great deal to Gertrude Stein".
[11] Braschi has published scholarly articles on Spanish-language poetry by Cervantes, Garcilaso, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, and César Vallejo; and a book on Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.
[2][1][28] She is the subject of Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, a scholarly anthology edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Tess O'Dwyer, and Ilan Stavans.