OCCT TT 2022 -Week 0 Updates
Joseph Hankinson
Welcome back!
We have a packed schedule this term. Join us for a huge range of online and in-person events, from our Discussion Group sessions and a festival of events on Transnational Africa, to the Fiction and Other Minds Seminar and this year’s Oxford Translation Day, which culminates in the award of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize!
Here's a glimpse of what's lined up:
On Wednesday of First Week, the OCCT's Karolina Watroba will be in discussion with Brigitte Gautier (Lille / Paris) about 'Zbigniew Herbert and the Poetics of Giving'.
On Monday of Second Week, Mohini Gupta discusses her Hindi translations of Vikram Seth’s English poetry, specifically from the collection Beastly Tales from Here and There.
Third Week sees this term’s Fiction and Other Minds Seminar. Our speakers, cognitive psychologist Professor Joseph Glicksohn of Bar Ilan University, and literary scholar Professor Chanita Goodblatt of Ben Gurion University in the Negev, will be presenting their collaborative research on “Gestalt Psychology and Cognitive Literary Studies.”
Monday of Fourth Week, in an online session of the Discussion Group, Ellen Jones presents her book Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas, which examines the connection between translation and multilingualism and considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation.
Our third Discussion Group session takes place on Monday of Seventh Week. Our speakers, Michael and Aleksandra Parker discuss, will their work as co-translators of Polish literature into English, particularly their 2017 translation of Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czesław Miłosz, and their future translation projects. Seventh Week also brings this year’s Oxford Translation Day, which will take place on Saturday 11 June.
Eighth week features our final Discussion Group session of the term. This week, Dorothée Boulanger presents a comparative reading of Tahar Djaout’s Les chercheurs d’os and Pepetela’s As aventuras de Ngunga, examining more precisely intergenerational relations, tensions and frictions during and after anticolonial conflicts of liberation in Algeria and Angola. This week also sees a Festival of events on Transnational Africa: Print Cultures, Translation, Comparison.
Be sure to check our events page over the course of the term for all the up-to-date information!
Calls for Papers and Events
[1] CfP: Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2023)
DECOLONIZING DECADENCE?
Decadence studies has long recognized the relationship between literary and artistic decadence and an imaginary stance toward the decline of empires. Nevertheless, even when the decadents presented themselves as cosmopolitan critics of national artistic paradigms or jingoistic imperialisms, decadent art and literature has been suffused with colonialist tropes, a pervasive orientalism, and the persistent exoticization (if also celebration) of the Other. Indeed, much European decadent art and literature has been entranced by settler-colonial fantasies of extinct and vanishing peoples. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, Dorian collects strange instruments from ‘the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations.’ What would it mean, then, to ‘decolonize decadence,’ to decentre, ‘undiscipline,’ and displace literary and artistic imaginaries so enmeshed with Western myths of progress, decline, and racial degeneration? How can Decadence Studies and studies of aestheticism engage with concepts such as coloniality or highlight indigenous voices or epistemologies that might imagine decadence and aestheticism otherwise? How does decadent or anti-decadent writing think through the consequences of decadence (artistic, cultural, or historical) for the processes of political, cultural, or psychological decolonization? Moreover, how can Decadence Studies as a field take account of how decolonizing movements worldwide deployed decadence and related concepts to oppose Western influences, to devalue or disavow cultural production seen as too Western? For this special issue of Volupté, we seek essays featuring a range of periods and geographies that address the following questions:
In what ways have decadent aesthetics, decadent collecting practices, or aestheticist thought depended on the global circulation of texts, goods, bodies, and artifacts enabled by imperialism and the extractive practices of global capitalism? How have decadent texts, artworks, and aesthetic ideas been circulated, received, and translated outside the West? What archives of decadent, anti-decadent, or aestheticist thought have been overlooked?
What settler epistemologies are implicit in scholarship on decadent art and literature? What settler epistemologies are implicit in, or subverted by, decadent literary strategies? How can decadent texts be read to expose the logics and practices of settler colonialism?
How can decadence studies give priority to indigenous knowledge and voices, or read decadent texts contrapuntally with decolonial thought? How can we locate indigenous or subaltern knowledge, resistance, or agency in decadent texts, however mediated or translated?
How can one decentre the whiteness of decadence studies? How have writers and artists of colour, postcolonial writers and artists, or writers and artists outside Europe pushed back against, or even embraced and revised, the Western conception of decadence or European decadent aesthetics? How have writers of colour grappled with issues of orientalism, exoticism, and auto-exoticism?
How have the pressures of anti-colonial nationalism sought to purge ‘decadent’ Western influences in colonial and postcolonial art and literature? Can decadent aesthetics be turned toward decolonial ends?
We seek articles and book reviews to be submitted by 15 September 2022 for publication in the March 2023 issue. Articles should be about 6-7,000 words in length, including endnotes, and book reviews should be no more than 2,000 words. All textual material must be in Microsoft Word format and follow the MHRA Style Guide.
To propose an article, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a brief scholarly bio of 100 words to Robert Stilling, rstilling@fsu.edu, by 1 May 2022.
[2] Event: Amharic Poetry Translation Workshop and Reading
Thursday 5 May, 2022—16:30-20:00
Shulman Auditorium, Queen’s College, University of Oxford
For more information, and to register for free, visit: https://bit.ly/3OoSufF
[3] Event: University of Warwick Seminars in Translation and Transcultural Studies
As part of Warwick’s Summer Term programme of online research seminars in Translation and Transcultural Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (University of Warwick), we are delighted to announce our forthcoming seminars which may be of interest for both colleagues and students:
Dr Wine Tesseur (Belgian NGO Trias) on Wednesday 11 May 2022, 4-5pm (UK time): 'Translation as social justice: translation policies and practices in NGOs'
The event takes place on MS Teams. We would kindly ask you to register in advance by completing the short registration form by Monday 9th May midnight (UK time). You will be provided with the relevant link Teams invite prior to the talk
Dr James Hawkey (University of Bristol) on Wednesday 25 May 2022, 5-6pm (UK time): 'Small states, small languages, big ambiguities? Language policy and issues of migration in Andorra and Luxembourg'
The event takes place on MS Teams. We would kindly ask you to register in advance by completing the short registration form by Monday 23rd May midnight (UK time). You will be provided with the relevant link Teams invite prior to the talk.
[4] CfPs: Cultural Enclosure and Literary Form conference
Friday 30th September 2022. University of Oxford, St. Cross Building
Keynote: Dr Sharae Deckard (UCD)
Please submit abstracts (300 words max.) for fifteen-minute papers to: enclosureconf@ell.ox.ac.uk by 11th May 2022. Speakers will be notified of decision by 31st May 2022. Limited funds are available for speaker travel expenses – please enquire using same email.
It has become something of a commonplace that post-Fordist value production revolves increasingly around ‘intangible […] cultural products or products of experience’ (Massumi, 2003). Cultural marketability – the marketability of place, heritage, and collective self-representation – is a major economic force. As economies continue (unevenly) to transnationalise, cultural and heritage industries have become a central pillar of development for diverse communities, ranging from cities to nations to ethnic groups. This is a double-edged sword: it deepens unequal dependencies upon external validation of cultural identity – specifically validation via consumer desire. But it also bears potential to mobilise and preserve important ‘strategic essentialisms’: to ‘help articulations of racial/ethnic/cultural identity survive’ (Hollinshead, 2004: 7). This conference seeks to investigate the links between cultural commodification, globalisation, and literary form.
Keith Hollinshead writes that heritage industries are today ‘a vital medium of being and becoming which not only talks about worlds, but decidedly makes (or, at least, helps make) worlds’ (2004: 38). This function has also been ascribed to literature. Literature’s ‘peculiar ontological statuses allow it to ‘open up a world and envision itself as being part of this world that is in the making’ (Cheah, 2008: 34); it is an artform invested in ‘the “physics” of aesthetic worldedness’ (Hayot, 2012: 7). Taking as its premise, then, the notion that cultural commodification and literature have in common procedures of worldmaking and enclosure – the containment and arrangement of symbolic forms – the conference asks how literature might productively interrogate cultural commodification projects.
We invite papers that examine the role of literary form in depicting, endorsing, and subverting cultural commodification phenomena – understood broadly to include e.g., tourism and heritage enterprises, ‘ethno-preneurialism’, branded cities, and patenting of ‘cultural knowledge’. Does literary form reproduce the dimensions, boundaries and affects of the ‘worlds’ envisioned in such projects? Or does it challenge them?
Papers are welcomed from scholars working across a wide range of literary forms – novel, poetry, drama, and other genres – and by scholars working on periods outside of the post-Fordist era. Papers are especially welcomed from scholars working on Global South literatures and/ or based in Global South institutions, for whom provisions will be made for virtual participation.
Possible topics include:
- the ‘narratology’ of tourist/heritage sites
- the imbrication of ‘intangible’ cultural products with tangible issues of land and resource management
- literary constructions of ‘local colour’ and of the touristic ‘gaze’
- the relationship between literature and advertising materials
- the relationship between cultural identity and leisure/pleasure
- tensions between heritage and invention in constructing cultural identity
- difficulties/ impediments in delivering cultural products to market
