OCCT HT 2022 - Week 7 Updates
Good Afternoon!
This coming Monday, our final Discussion Group session of the term welcomes Marta Arnaldi, who will discuss how literary canons travel across space as well as through time, and are thus best understood as supra-geographical, rather than simply trans-historical, entities. Arnaldi will explore this idea by sharing the findings of her forthcoming monograph, titled The Diasporic Canon: American Anthologies of Contemporary Italian Poetry 1945-2015 (Legenda 2022).
Seventh Week featured two brilliant events. First, the hugely popular Metaphors in Translation conference: featuring a range of workshops and panels, this conference celebrated the coming together of translators, academics, postgraduate researchers, and an engaged audience, and foregrounded multifaceted interdisciplinary discussion of the shared worlds of metaphor and translation. A reflection on this conference will soon be published in the OCCT Review, so be sure to stay posted! Second, our Special Event on Polish World Literature: this Roundtable Discussion was centred around the recently published Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (September 2021). We were joined by one of the book’s editors, Dr Stanley Bill (Cambridge), as well as by Professor Tamara Trojanowska (Toronto), the editor of Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (2018), and Dr Karolina Wątroba (Oxford). The roundtable, moderated by Ola Sidorkiewicz (Oxford), prompted a lively discussion. Thank you to everyone who attended both events!
Calls for Papers and Events:
[1] CfPs: The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and Her Diasporas
In the hope of fostering a transatlantic dialogue, The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and its
Diasporas for June 12-20, 2022, brings together speakers and participants invested in the Black
Diasporas. The Symposium is a collaborative effort between faculty at three institutions: Rutgers
University, the University of Assane Seck University in Ziguinchor and Cheikh Anta Diop University
in Dakar, where the symposium will be held. The Symposium will also serve to raise awareness and
funds to support a collaborative Center for Translation Studies, Literature and Writing at Assane Seck
University in Ziguinchor, which is in southern Senegal, and located at the crossroads of French,
English and Portuguese regions superimposed on half a dozen local languages and their resulting
creoles. Please note that working languages are English, French and Wolof.
The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and her Diasporas invites and encourages proposals
(abstracts) for themes including but not restricted to:
¨ Counternarratives and Translating History;
¨ The (Diasporic) Language of Hip-Hop;
¨ 1619 and the Birth of Modernity;
¨ Poetry of the Black Atlantic;
¨ BLM and the Afterlives of Negritude;
¨ Creolization and creoleness;
¨ Creolization and Cultural Globalization;
¨ Creolization and the Diasporas;
¨ The Retrieval of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems;
¨ Superdiversity and the Complexities of New Migration Streams;
¨ Cultural and Linguistic Continuity and Changes;
¨ Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Diversity in Africa and the Diasporas;
¨ Cultural Global Perspective: Africa and the Diasporas from the Inside and the Outside;
¨ The Postcolonial Configurations of North/South, West/ East, First World/Second
World/Third World;
¨ New Communication Media and Technologies, New and Hybrid Cultural Forms and
Practices, and Globalized Economies in Africa and the Diasporas;
¨ Hegemony, Politics and Economy in Africa and the Diasporas;
¨ Terrorism and the New Challenges of Security and Peace in Africa and the Diasporas;
¨ Centrality, Marginality, and the Human Conditions;
¨ Postcoloniality and Euro-Americanism in World Politics, Economy and Culture;
¨ Geopolitics and The Postcolonial: Reshaping North-South Cooperation;
¨ Reshaping the Africa-Diasporas Relations;
¨ (Post)Coloniality, Cultural and Civilizational Reconstruction in Africa and the Diasporas;
¨ Rethinking Negritude and Pan-Africanism.
*** The symposium will culminate with a Juneteenth memorial gathering on Gorée Island and an
optional visit to The African Renaissance Monument in Dakar.
Submissions:
1. Please submit a detailed abstract of 500 words or less and author’s biography by March 15th
2. Selected abstracts and notification will be shared on April 5th
3. Final papers are due on May 15th
4. Papers must be less than 4000 words, Times New Roman 12 point and single spaced
5. Papers need to fit into a 15 to 20 minutes time limit for The Dakar Translation Symposium:
Africa and her Diasporas (no exceptions)
For symposium format and questions please contact:
isgrjcamden@oq.rutgers.edu
In Africa in French, Wolof and English: Dr. Saliou Dione, Cheikh Anta Diop University
(salioudione@hotmail.com)and Dr. Baboucar Diouf, Assane Seck University (b.douf@univ-zig.sn)
In the United States in English and French: Prof. Gregory Pardlo or Dr. Baba Badji
(isgrjcamden@oq.rutgers.edu)
[2] Event: Oxford Seminar on Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary ChinaPoverty and Squalor in Modern Chinese Realism
Keru Cai, University of Oxford
Tuesday 8 March2022, 17:00 GMT
China Centre, Lucina Ho Room
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals looked beyond Chinese borders to the foreign other, Western cultures that offered alternatives to indigenous tradition; and within Chinese borders they became concerned about the social other, substrata of Chinese society that had hitherto largely escaped literary notice. Contact with the foreign literary other – particularly Russian realism – facilitated Chinese literary representation of the social other – the poor. This talk demonstrates that Chinese realist writers frequently turned to the topic of material poverty – the lack of adequate resources such as food, clothing and shelter – to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. Deploring the moral poverty of their culture, their answer was to depict, with radical seriousness and concern, the bodily suffering of the poor – homeless vagrants, servants and bondmaids, prostitutes, rickshaw pullers, streetfood hawkers, silkworm farmers and starving artists. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with foreign literary resources generated major innovations in narrative technique. In particular, Dr Cai focuseson how writers drew upon Russian intertexts to represent the nation in narrative form. Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun wished to produce literature that would awaken the Chinese masses to their national plight, cultural backwardness, and literary deficiencies. How, then, were they to describe a problem prevalent on a massive scale, endemic to an entire population, in a narrative that follows merely a handful of individual characters? I show how appropriations from Russian realist texts equipped Lu Xun with strategies to encapsulate the general in the specific, the national in the individual, by portraying poverty and squalor. Enabling these kinds of narratives were the rhetorical affordances of metonymy and synecdoche. These strategies arose from Lu Xun’s study of Gogol, and set a precedent for Chinese realist writers following him.
Keru Cai is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford; and this fall begins as Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. Dr Cai’s book project, From Russia, with Squalor: Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism, demonstrates that modern Chinese writers drew upon Russian literature to write about poverty, in a bid to enrich Chinese culture by creating a syncretic new realism. At the same time, Dr Cai shows that writers remained keenly aware of the problematic nature of deploying this weighty topic for aesthetic purposes. Dr Cai has published widely on Chinese and comparative literature, including articles in MCLC, Prism, Comparative Literature, Concentric, and CLEAR
[3] CfPs: Utopia and Ecotone Conference
Conference venue: Ghent University, Belgium
Dates:29 September –1 October 2022
Languages: English, French
Deadline for abstracts:30 April 2022
Notification of acceptance: 31 May 2022
After a series of conferences held at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Universitéde Poitiers and Universitéde La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016, 2018), at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences in Calcutta (CSSSC, India, 2018), Manhattanville College (USA, 2019), Concordia Universitý(Canada, 2019) and University of Cape Town (South Africa, 2021), this international conference at Ghent University will be the 8th opus of the “Ecotones: encounters, crossings, communities” (2015-2022) conference cycle. This interdisciplinary programme aims to open up the term “ecotone”, a concept hitherto used in geography and ecology, to the humanities, political and social sciences. The “Utopia and Ecotone” Conference will focus specifically on utopias that emerge from or relate to ecotones.
The “Utopia and Ecotone” conference will take place on 29 September –1 October in Ghent (Belgium). The languages of work will be English and French. Each presentation will last 20 minutes (followed by a discussion). A peer-reviewed publication of the proceedings is envisaged. The conference will be an in-person event. Travel and accommodation costs will have to be covered by the participants. Registration fees will be requested.
How to submit:
Paper proposals, in English or French, in .doc or .docx format, should include a title, a 300-word abstract that clearly specifies the corpus studied, a short critical bibliography, and a 5-line bio-bibliographic note (including name, institutional affiliation and email address). Proposals must be sent by email toJustine Feyereisen: justine.feyereisen@ugent.be by 30April 2022. The scientific committee’s decision will be delivered by 31May.
[4] CfPs: "Novel Beginnings: Transnational Perspectives on Early Modern Fiction"
A Conference hosted by the University of Huelva (Spain), and running from 14-16 September, 2022.
We would like to address the topic of the origins of the novel in English by reflecting on the notion of beginnings and by focusing specifically on the transnational nature of the genre in the early modern period. We are interested in revising the extant theories of the novel, as well as to study the ancient, eastern and European influences on the English native tradition. We are also keen on discussing the connections between the novel and the other genres, as they represent the evolution of the form till the end of the seventeenth century.
We invite proposals from scholars and academics on these related fields, but will also welcome papers from postgraduate and postdoctoral students. We hope to offer participants a productive academic and social occasion to share knowledge and interact profitably.
The deadline for abstract submission is March 15, 2022. Please, send your proposals to novelbeginnings2022@gmail.com
[5] Event: Performing Medicine
Thursday 10 March, Magdalen College, Oxford
- Surgical Operation and Anatomical Dissection as Theatre, a lecture by Professor Vishy Mahadevan
- Trust Me, I'm a Doctor, an evening performance by Edward's Boys
For tickets, visit https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/kes
Questions about the event: email performingmedicine@ell.ox.ac.uk
