We kick off our programme for the Amsterdam Art Week with a special evening featuring poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, who will give a preview presentation of her forthcoming publication Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, September 2025). Following a reading from the book, Scappettone will be in conversation with fellow poet Mia You and If I Can’t Dance curator Sara Giannini.
Coalescing two decades of research, the book uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, authors who write this poetry occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies as well as globalization, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil.
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—Scappettone explores how these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions.
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.
Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2024) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.
Image description
Book cover of Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism by Jennifer Scappettone. The title appears on the right side against a black background, with the colors of the letters echoing the hues of the artwork on the left half of the cover. This artwork is a watercolor fragment of an open notebook, with horizontal lines layered in turquoise, yellow, orange, and ochre. Arabic words are written along the lines, with a larger, thicker black letter at the center.
Accessibility information
– If I Can’t Dance is located on the second floor with unfortunately no elevator
– Seated event
– Gender neutral WC
– Language: English
Acknowledgements
The event is co-organized with the Utrecht University’s Network for Environmental Humanities. If I Can’t Dance is structurally supported by the Mondriaan Fund.
