[Discussion] CFP: Translation, Empire, (Post)Coloniality (11/1/04; ACLA, 3/11/05-3/13/05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

2005 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association
(ACLA)
March 11-13, 2005
Penn State University -- University Park, PA

Seminar Title:  Translation, Empire, (Post)Coloniality
Organizer: Shaden M. Tageldin, University of Minnesota

"Translation," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written, "is the most
intimate act of reading. I surrender to the text when I translate."
Spivak, of course, writes here of translating a Bengali tongue whose
intimacy has been lost to the (post)colonial Bengali subject, not of
what might be at stake in the "surrender" of translation when a
(post)colonial writer translates a colonizer's language. Yet
translation, literary and otherwise, figures prominently in the
cultural history of imperialism and begs a closer critical look.

This seminar invites papers that interrogate the role of translation in
imperialisms and reactions to imperialism--past and present--in Asia,
Africa, the Arab world, the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere. How have
representatives of empire (missionaries, traders, civil servants,
teachers) used translation to elicit the surrender of their would-be
subjects? Why have colonized subjects (often writers and intellectuals)
themselves pursued translation to unlock the secrets of their rulers'
"superiority" and to propel their own cultures toward the colonizer's
presumed "modernity"? Which face of translation--equivalence or
incommensurability--forges equity under/after empire, which reinforces
subjection? How might we theorize imperial translation--in terms
linguistic, material, religious, affective, sexual, psychological? What
are the implications of the translation-empire nexus for comparative
literature today?

Submit 200-word abstracts *directly* to the 2005 ACLA Annual Meeting
website at
http://app.outreach.psu.edu/acla/cfp/add_paperproposal.asp

Further information on the 2005 ACLA Annual Meeting appears on
http://www.outreach.psu.edu/programs/ACLA/

Inquires only--no abstracts--may be directed to  <tageldin@umn.edu>.

****************************************************************
Shaden M. Tageldin
Assistant Professor

Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
350 Folwell Hall, 9 Pleasant Street S.E.
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Minneapolis, MN  55455-0195

Office: 612.625.8445
Dept: 612.624.8099
Fax: 612.626.0228
E-mail: tageldin@umn.edu
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