Full-program video: Lily Hoang and Jackie Wang: March 3, 2018
Video highlight clips: Lily Hoang, from "On Catastrophe" (A Bestiary) | Jackie Wang on police violations of human lives, from Carceral Capitalism
The second of two Poetry Center events in conjunction with the nationwide Poetry Coalition series on The Body
Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation to the Academy of American Poets on behalf of the Poetry Coalition.
“What do we make
of the flowering vine
that uses as its trellis
the walls of a prison?”
A reading and book party for Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism, the newest volume in Semiotext(e)’s Interventions Series. This book of essays includes Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” besides essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later, and how new carceral modes emerging since the 1990s have blurred the distinction between the inside and the outside of prison.
Jackie Wang is introduced by Brandon Brown, and joined by acclaimed essayist and prolific fiction writer Lily Hoang. Hoang, visiting from San Diego where she teaches in the MFA program at UCSD, is the author of five books of essays and fiction, most recently A Bestiary (Cleveland State University Press, 2016), selected by Wayne Koestenbaum for the inaugural Cleveland State University Poetry Center Nonfiction Contest. Koestenbaum notes: “Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can aspire to.” And Maggie Nelson adds: “Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary…. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake.”
On Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism:
The Poet and the Jalier: Cracking the US Prison System
Related event:
Lily Hoang and Jackie Wang, reading and in conversation