Overview
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. Authors who write xenoglossic verse occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic ""orphan tongues"" that rebuff nationalist ideologies, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil while rendering the reactionary category of the barbarian obsolete. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions. 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-this book explores how poetry can both represent and jumpstart metamorphosis of the shape and sound of citizenship, modeling paths toward alternative republics in which poetry might assume a central agency.
Full Product Details
Author: Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231212090
ISBN 10: 0231212097
Pages: 408
Publication Date: 14 October 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Awaiting stock
The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you.
Reviews
In Poetry After Barbarism, Jennifer Scappettone argues for nomadic, miscegenated, “xenoglossic” poetries as fierce forms of linguistic and political resistance. Prodigiously researched cross-cultural readings celebrate a stellar constellation of consequential poets: Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Etel Adnan, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. -- Charles Bernstein, author of <i>The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies</i> Scappettone gathered a queer family of literary orphans to found a pentecostal, radically stateless poetic nation: a new tradition built on undoing empire, unlearning mastery, and lighting a path through the ruins of fascist aesthetics. In a time of recrudescence, her scholarship shows us that xenoglossia and poetry are not reactions or responses, but rather alternatives to fascism. -- Alessandro Giammei, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University
In Poetry After Barbarism, Jennifer Scappettone argues for nomadic, miscegenated, “xenoglossic” poetries as fierce forms of linguistic and political resistance. Prodigiously researched cross-cultural readings celebrate a stellar constellation of consequential poets: Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Etel Adnan, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. -- Charles Bernstein, author of <i>The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies</i> Scappettone gathered a queer family of literary orphans to found a pentecostal, radically stateless poetic nation: a new tradition built on undoing empire, unlearning mastery, and lighting a path through the ruins of fascist aesthetics. In a time of recrudescence, her scholarship shows us that xenoglossia and poetry are not reactions or responses, but rather alternatives to fascism. -- Alessandro Giammei, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University Poetry After Barbarism, the expression of fourteen years of passionately heteroglossic scholarship, is truly a handbook for the joyous resistance. ""Syncretism can only truthfully come to fruition in tumult,"" Scappettone writes of the wild lexicographer Emilio Villa’s homoerotic experiments in borderless etymology and liquid tableware, of the milkdresses of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, of the radio conductive junkjewels of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, of the panmusical metavulgate of Amelia Rosselli, of the radical pentacosticism of LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, of the discomposed cartography of M. NourbeSe Philip. In her delicately robust readings Scappettone untethers identity from territory in favor of a translingual proposition—that tumult’s time is now. -- Lisa Robertson, author of <i>The Baudelaire Fractal</i> and <i>Nilling</i> Xenoglossia, as illuminating critical theory and resistant, liberatory poetic practice, feels especially appropriate for our current moment of rising authoritarianism, nationalism and fascism, and Jennifer Scappettone provides an excellent guide through her rigorous, nuanced readings in Poetry After Barbarism. Brimming with insight, politically aware, and written with verve, this is one study that will be as useful to fellow scholars as to poets and other artists in charting a path forward to the future. -- John Keene, Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies, Rutgers University-Newark
Author Information
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.
