Event Type
This panel proposes bilingualism as a form of poetic inquiry, one that enables poets to observe the culturally expressive potential of remaking monlingualized, standardized forms of languages reflexively and expressively. As each of the poets demonstrates through their own innovative work, bilingual poetry happens amid the socially constraining monolingualist assumptions about language, and breaking free from this unleashes linguistic power across borders between genres, forms, and languages. The poets in this panel will offer bilingual approaches to understanding the language games of being biculturally critical and creative. Luviette Resto pushes against the colonial linguistic mindset exploring deeper Bad Bunny’s Grammy performance where “singing in non-English” and “speaking in non-English” was plastered on the screen. Aditi Machado investigates translation as the means by which languages can transform the material of a text, thinking through the character of these new materialities, what they afford sonically, semantically, and even opaquely. Steven Alvarez looks to “walls” as metaphors for containing and excluding bilingual poetics, and translingual poetics as a means for dismantling them. Edward Vidaurre delves into the self-awareness of bilingual poetry, finding power across languages to speak the lived experiences of biculturalism.