Gilman Hall 479

The Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures are pleased to welcome Maia Gil’Adí, Assistant Professor of Latinx and Multiethnic Literature at Boston University, for the lecture:

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.