100 Refutations & A Conversation with Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
Introduction and Table of Contents

	A Conversation with Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas   100 Refutations Published Serially in The Brooklyn Rail

On January 11, 2018, during an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers to discuss the protection of immigrants from South American and African countries, President Donald Trump referred to these nations as “shithole countries.”

Writer, translator, and former VCU assistant professor, Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, was visiting her mother in Colombia when she first heard news of Trump’s language over the radio. The words of her mother—“What could you even say to something like that?”—prompted Ferreira to undertake what would become the one-hundred-day project of translating and archiving the works of writers from these so-called “shithole countries.” Interspersed at regular intervals, she includes ten of her own essays growing out of the project.

Ferreira approached editors of The Brooklyn Rail with the idea of her project; her 100 Refutations began publication in that journal in April of 2018 and concluded one hundred days later in July of 2018.

On March 22, 2019, Katherine Mooney Brooks, then Lead Associate Editor of Blackbird, interviewed Ferreira to discuss the project and her process. Blackbird staff, including editors and graduate and undergraduate interns, were in attendance.

Because The Brooklyn Rail is published in a blog format (stacking the texts in reverse order of publication) it can be difficult to navigate 100 Refutations in chronological order. In conjunction with a recorded conversation with Ferreira hosted by Blackbird, we are providing a chronological table of contents to the project with the blessings of our friends at The Brooklyn Rail.

The audio recording of this conversation, and the chronological table of contents for 100 Refutations, can be found under the Features menu in the current issue, as well as in the right sidebar menu of this introductory page.

The editors at Blackbird are sincerely grateful to Jen Zoble at The Brooklyn Rail for granting permission to host a table of contents linking the title of each individual publication comprising the 100 Refutations project with its corresponding page in The Brooklyn Rail’s archive. We feel moved to support these acts of refutation, and to raise awareness of Ferreira’s project and the writers it features.