[Discussion] Forging the Local and the Global

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

Forging the Local and the Global: Textual Translation and Migration
Location: South Africa

This conference seeks to examine literary and other modes of cultural production
as forms of flow and exchange in the arena of global apartheid. The conference
implicates the discursive practices that articulate unequal relations and
disjunctive temporalities between different localities, and alludes to the
practices of translating across cultures. In particular, it seeks to
conceptualise the role of literature and the visual arts in tracing and mapping
the cartographies, movements and fault lines of past imperialisms and of
contemporary empire with its new forms of sovereignty. The conference invokes
location, this place and elsewhere, and movement, journeys from one location to
another, from homeland to foreign land. It raises issues of identity and of
agency, and gestures towards the body as locus of inscriptions that are both
culturally specific and, increasingly, transcultural. We hope that the focus
areas – global apartheid, human and textual traffic, travel records,
literary canonization – will assist us in understanding our interlinked
histories, as well as our imagined presents and futures.

The conference theme reflects the location of Stellenbosch University near the
southern tip of Africa, within sight of Table Mountain, at the point of
intersecting trade routes between east and west.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

# Global Apartheid, Perpetual War: Bodies and Biopolitics
# Migrations of Texts: Sites of Production and Reception
# Crossing Borders in Literature and Visual Arts
# The Challenges of Translation, Transculturalism, Tricontinentalism
# Travel-Writing, Trade-Routes and Slave-Routes
# International Reading Publics and the Creation of a South African Canon


Karlien van der Schyff
English Department
Stellenbosch University
Private Bag X1
Matieland
7602 SOUTH AFRICA

Email: global@sun.ac.za

Visit the website at http://academic.sun.ac.za/english/localglobal2006/