New Books in Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism: Rethinking Latinidad

Description

Please join the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism for its second New Books workshop, featuring new Johns Hopkins faculty member Maia Gil'Adí, who will present her book Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence, in conversation with Drew Daniel. Lunch will be provided.

In Doom Patterns, Maia Gil'Adí takes up speculative fiction as a site for theorizing Latinx identity across national and ethnic borders and shows the vital role of historical trauma in its formation. Her analysis moves beyond reparative modes of reading to consider how literary representations of violence, destruction, and pain also elicit pleasurable affective and aesthetic experiences. Gil'Adí theorizes the paradox of pleasurable violence through the notion of doom patterns—narrative devices that include thematic repetition, nonlinear narration, character fragmentation, and unresolved plots.

Doom patterns return the reader to instances of historical violence and destruction, revealing them as excessive and otherworldly processes that require the tropes of speculative fiction. Examining novels by established Latinx authors such as Junot Díaz and Cristina García as well as multiethnic writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sesshu Foster, Gil'Adí challenges definitions of what constitutes Latinx literature and notions of the speculative by dismantling generic boundaries and entrenched definitions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood. In so doing, she allows for a more capacious consideration of the speculative, realism, history, and the role of violence in literature.

Maia Gil'Adí is an assistant professor of Latinx studies in the Johns Hopkins Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Drew Daniel is professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Johns Hopkins Department of English.