The Resistance of Motherless Tongues

Talk and reading by poet, literary scholar, and translator Jennifer Scappettone on her book, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism, Columbia University Press, October 2025

A reservation is required at rsvp@primolevicenter.org. Indicate the program title.

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’s new book 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 Fascist ideologies denied the reality of cultural admixture and the humanity of the stranger, Amelia Rosselli developed poetic and musical strategies for tuning in to a more-than-national “panmusic” rebuking the confines of the brotherhood and “tribe.” Scappettone will discuss her book and perform her translations of Rosselli, which have metamorphosed over the years to produce translation “chords” expressing the infinite potential of Rosselli’s idiolect.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, translational, and scholarly arts, and is Professor of English and romance languages, creative writing, gender studies, and the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts and Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books, of which Columbia UP has published Poetry After Barbarism and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice. Her translations in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli won the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/De Palchi Book Award.

Image: Monotype by Amelia Rosselli shown in Stella Savino’s film L‘assillo è rima, 2005