“poetry after barbarism”, by jennifer scappettone: online talk, h. 00:00

Society of Fellows, American Academy in Rome, Tuesday talk from On Fascism series, in conversation with Franco Baldasso, h. 6 pm ET (online) = h. 00:00 Wed 3rd, Rome Time
Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tuesday-talks-poetry-after-barbarism-by-jennifer-scappettone-tickets-1980610633722

Poetry After Barbarism. The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism

Columbia University Press, 2025

Jennifer Scappettone discusses her new book (begun at the AAR) with Franco Baldasso

Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors, this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship, modeling paths toward alternative republics in which poetry might assume a central agency.

Jennifer Scappettone, 2011 Fellow, works in zones of confluence and cross-contamination of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, on the page and off. She is Professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she founded and directs the Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab (The City and its Others). She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology of the Corporate Dump. She is also the editor and translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which won the biennial Raiziss/De Palchi prize in translation from the Academy of American Poets.

Franco Baldasso, 2019 Fellow, is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Bard College, New York, and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2019. He is also co-Director of the Graduate Summer School “The Cultural Heritage and Memory of Totalitarianism” at Sapienza University in Rome. Among his publications: Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy. (2022), which was awarded the 2023 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History, and will be published in Italian in 2026.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-after-barbarism/9780231212090/

“poetry after barbarism”, by jennifer scappettone

“In Poetry After Barbarism, Jennifer Scappettone argues for nomadic, miscegenated, ‘xenoglossic’ poetries as fierce forms of linguistic and political resistance. Prodigiously researched cross-cultural readings celebrate a stellar constellation of consequential poets: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs.”

— Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies

• In this book, Jennifer Scappettone argues that the poetry of motherless tongues is the best form of resistance to the rising tide of nationalism, empire, fascism, and authoritarianism.
• Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship; and it
• untethers identity from territory in favor of a translingual proposition—that tumult’s time is now.

Jennifer Scappettone is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43. She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli.

You can find more information about the book at the Columbia University Press website:

Against a backdrop of xenophobic and ethnonationalist fantasies of linguistic purity, Poetry After Barbarism uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Departing from the national and global paradigms that dominate literary history, Jennifer Scappettone traces the aesthetic and geopolitical resonance of “xenoglossic” poetics: poetry composed in the space of contestation between national languages, concretizing dreams of mending the ruptures traced to the story of Babel. As global migration, aerial bombardment, and the wireless telegraph shrank distances with brute force during the twentieth century, visions of transcultural communication emerged in the hopes of bridging linguistic difference. At the same time, evolving Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger.

Authors who write xenoglossic verse occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil while rendering the reactionary category of the barbarian obsolete. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions. Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship, modeling paths toward alternative republics in which poetry might assume a central agency.

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https://cup.columbia.edu/book/nolympians/9781773632766

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