Poetry After Barbarism

Jennifer Scappettone’s Poetry After Barbarism
Sunday, March 1
Doors: 4:30pm
Event: 5pm

FREE/RSVP

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The Poetic Research Bureau presents a talk and discussion for Jennifer Scappettone's new book Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism.

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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.