Please join us for Maia Gil’Adí’s job talk on Wednesday, March 13^th, in Gilman 479 at 5pm.

“Thinking from the Hole: Latinidad on the Edge” 

Drawing on her current book project, Maia Gil’Adí examines representations of violence—from the sweeping scale of global imperialism to the close intimacy of domestic violence—in Latinx literature. Putting portrayals of destruction and pain in prose fiction into conversation with aesthetic pleasure, she argues that these two figurations collaborate in the cultural production of Latinx literature and latinidad. To bring these two ostensibly incongruous fields of narrative production into rapprochement, she advances a Latinx speculative reading practice that illuminates elements in the texts that seemingly lay hidden, reveals the excessive in what passes as mundane, and underscores the ongoing nature of imperial, racial, and ethno-national violence. Turning to works by Junot Díaz and Hernan Diaz, Gil’Adí shows how formal elements in the text consistently return readers to moments of destruction and ultimately reveal the speculative nature of latinidad itself.

Bio: Maia Gil’Adí is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University, where she specializes in Latinx literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latino Studies, Studies in American Fiction, ASAP/Journal, and edited volumes with Cambridge University Press and Palgrave McMillan. Her first book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She has been an Institute for Citizens and Scholars Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), a member of the founding executive committee for the Latinx Forum of the Modern Language Association, co-chair of the Latinx Section of the Latin American Studies Association, and is the incoming Second Vice President of the ASAP motherboard. She is also the creator and curator of The Zombie Archive.