This talk examines how National Book Award-winning poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky and poet-essayist Wendy S. Walters explore the relationship between capitalism and racialization through poetics of spatial boundary formation. Mobilizing innovative poetic forms, Borzutzky’s recursive, translational syntax mirrors capitalist processes of abstraction and Walters’ sonnets are mapped onto suburban planning documents. Borzutzky’s poetry offers a sustained meditation on the globalized political economy of border walls, revealing how the US-Mexico boundary, debt walls, and factory enclosures simultaneously divide and connect populations through transnational circuits of capital accumulation and neoliberal state violence. Walters’ Troy, Michigan, a book-length experimental autobiography in sonnets, reads race as a set of bounded conditions of life in the post-Fordist Rust Belt structured by the history of residential segregation, highway and transportation infrastructure, and thwarted class mobility.

Christopher Chen is Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles, poetry, and reviews in boundary 2, Post45 Contemporaries, South Atlantic Quarterly, The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Money and American Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods (2022), a comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry.

Winter 2026 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Winter 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.