Lit & Luz Book Club: Poetry After Barbarism

Join the Lit & Luz Book Club/Club de Lectura this summer and fall to read and discuss some of today’s most exciting contemporary Mexico and Chicago based authors in both Spanish and English. Founded in 2018 by writer and Lit & Luz Literary Director emeritus, Miguel Jiménez, the esteemed local reading group is hosted this year by author and performer Angelica Julia Dávila and is an opportunity for Chicagoans to read latinx literature in translation and recent works by authors in Lit & Luz’s Collaboration Cohort and community.

About Poetry After Barbarism: Against a backdrop of xenophobia 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.