We are pleased to invite you to the next lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Fall semester!
Jennifer Scappettone
(University of Chicago)
Mother(less) Tongues of “America”: Xenoglossic Writing and Xenoglossic Breathing in the Poetry of Etel Adnan and LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs
Thursday, December 11, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Drawn from Jennifer Scappettone’s 2025 book Poetry After Barbarism, this talk will explore poetry’s transmutations of national and native languages through the work of two contemporary U.S. women artists: poet/journalist/painter Etel Adnan (Lebanon 1925 – Paris 2021) and poet/curator/performer LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs (Harlem, NYC 1970 – ). Introducing the concept of xenoglossia, or the use of languages to which one does not properly “belong”—broadly interpreted as resolution of the punishment of linguistic and cultural division following the fall of the Tower of Babel—Scappettone will analyze the translingual verse, artist’s books, and vocal performances of these writers, whose revolutionizing of languages from outside their prescribed domains transforms the national categories that are meant to contain them, while altering the presumptions of concepts of citizenship and statelessness.
Who?
Jennifer Scappettone is Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and of Romance Languages & Literatures as well as Faculty Affiliate of the Committee on Environment, Geography & Urbanization and of the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at the University of Chicago. Her work resides in zones of confluence and cross-contamination of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, on the page and off. She has published the critical monographs Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). As a poet, she is the author of several chapbooks and two full-length collections: From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from An Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2017). Recipient of multiple awards and grants. She spearheaded, and currently advises, UChicago’s Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab (The City and its Others).
