Introduction by Prof. Cristina Vatulescu
Jill Magi will read from her last book, LABOR, about contingent labor and institutions, about the archive, and about the slip, the leap, and the fall. She'll then read from SPEECH, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2019. SPEECH starts, in some ways, where LABOR left off: turning away from notions of official belonging as ideal. Both works take insurgency and betweenness as a place of learning, analysis, lyricism. In LABOR, characters lose and find themselves in signage, programs of betterment, official archives, hallways. In SPEECH, there is a woman who walks through a city something like Chicago and something like Abu Dhabi where saying whatever she wants is not a right, where freedom reveals itself to be contingent everywhere, and she is not unhappy. A conversation with Cristina Vatulescu will follow where new questions and thoughts--way beyond our ideas of "the literary"--are sure to emerge.
