4-5 April 2019
Skylight Room
CUNY Grad Center
This symposium will mark the end of an academic year in which the Committee on Globalization and Social Change has engaged the issue of “Translation.” Taking a broad view of the topic, we have treated translation as a practice and process of carrying across, of thinking and acting across various types of boundaries, whether real, reified, or imagined. We are especially interested in the profound challenges, generative possibilities, and unanticipated outcomes that follow attempts to pursue, discover, or fashion connections across singular, incommensurable, and untranslatable domains. At a time when so many planetary predicaments require translocal responses and alternatives, the politics of translation – the peril and promise of carrying across – emerges as an especially timey issue. We hope that this gathering of scholars working in different fields and world areas from various theoretical perspectives will help us to think together about the entwined political, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of translation today.
Of special note for Caribbeanists is Session III of the Practicing Translation, Translating Politics symposium, at 3pm on Friday, featuring presentations by Kaiama L. Glover and Brent Hayes Edwards. Their presentations are entitled, “Blackness’ in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race” and “Diasporic Literature and the Task of the Black Translator,” respectively.
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
THURSDAY, 4 April
Skylight Room
CUNY Grad Center
4:30 to 6:30pm
Book discussion of Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Converstion with the Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018), featuring Soulemayne Bachir Diagne (Columbia University) in conversation with Susan Buck-Morss (The Graduate Center) andR.A. Judy (University of Pittsburgh). Reception to follow.
***
FRIDAY, 5 April
Skylight Room
CUNY Grad Center
Symposium featuring presentations by Sadia Abbas (Rutgers-Newark), Gavin Arnall (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Fadi Bardawil (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University), Kaiama L. Glover (Barnard College, Columbia University), Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan University), and Lydia Liu (Columbia University). Reception to follow.
10:15am: Opening Remarks, Gary Wilder (The Graduate Center)
10:30–12pm: Session I
Sadia Abbas, “Form, Taxonomy, “Transcreation”
Ethan Kleinberg, “Hebrew into Greek: Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Lectures as the Promise and Peril of Translation”
12:15–1:45pm: Session II
Gavin Arnall, “Marxism as Translation”
Fadi Bardawi, “Re-Thinking the Arabization of Marxism”
3–4:30pm | Session III
Kaiama L. Glover, “Blackness’ in French: On Translation, Haiti, and the Matter of Race”
Brent Hayes Edwards, “Diasporic Literature and the Task of the Black Translator”
4:45–5:30: Session IV
Lydia Liu, “The Law of Multiplicity in Translation”
5:30–6:30pm: Closing Roundtable Discussion
These events will be live-streamed and recorded.
Above text adapted from webpage.
