OCCT MT 2020 Week 5 Updates
On Monday, 16 November 2020 (1-2pm), the Discussion Group welcomes Claudio Russello, an Oxford DPhil student, who will explore the topic, Transitioning into the vernacular: China and Greece in parallel. If you’d like to attend this online session, please see here for registration details: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/discussion-group-transitioning-vernacular-china-and-greece-parallel.
OCCT invites submissions for a one-day virtual workshop, Fictions of Retranslations: Retranslating Language and Style in Prose Fiction. The workshop will be hosted online, on 12 March 2021. We encourage doctoral students and early careers researchers working on retranslations of prose to send an abstract (350 words) and a brief bio (150 words) by 14 December 2020 to rowan.anderson@ell.ox.ac.uk and anna.saroldi@ell.ox.ac.uk. For the full CFP see here: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/fictions-retranslations-retranslating-language....
EVENTS AND CFPs
1. Érico Nogueira on Geoffrey Hill
Prof. Érico Nogueira is a distinguished Brazilian poet, translator and classicist who has been visiting Oxford this year, working on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill.
https://www.erealizacoes.com.br/autor/erico-nogueira
He will give a talk online on Thursday 19th November at 17.00 UK time on the following subject: ‘Geoffrey Hill’s Sapphics: A Translator’s Perspective’
All are welcome to join as below.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82388956265?pwd=bUxqNERVdjRVczBNdmp6VHN4ZzFhdz09
Meeting ID: 823 8895 6265
Passcode: 4kQM0j
2. Queen’s Translation Exchange
International Book Club - 8pm Wednesday 25th November
The next International Book Club meeting will be on Wednesday 25th November at 8pm (GMT). We’ll be discussing Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s book, Zero (Nordisk Books), translated from Norwegian. The translator, Rosie Hedger, will be joining us live for our discussion, taking place on Zoom.
The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, who have kindly offered us a discount. You can use the discount code IBCZERO15 to get 15% off at checkout until midnight on the day of the meeting.
To register, go to our website: https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/international-book-club
Gine Cornelia Pedersen debuted with this explosive novel, which won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award. Compared, in its home country of Norway, with a ‘punk rock single’, the unique lyrical style and frank description of life with mental health problems have come together to create one of the most exciting works of fiction from Scandinavia in recent years.
Rosie Hedger’s translation of Zero was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2019, and her translation of Agnes Ravatn’s The Bird Tribunal won an English PEN Translates Award in 2016. Ravatn’s novel was later selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime, broadcast in January 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Rosie was a candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. Since then she has worked on a range of projects, more information about which can be found here. She is a member of the Translator’s Association.
3. Queen’s Translation Exchange
A translation workshop with Rachael McGill, working collaboratively on a novel by Adrienne Yabouza from the Central African Republic.
Wed, 2 December 2020
19:30 – 21:00 GMT
Online Event
Join fellow readers and writers to translate together a passage from Co-épouses et co-veuves by Adrienne Yabouza. The workshop will be led by Rachael McGill, currently working on a translation of the novel for Dedalus Books. No knowledge of French is necessary! Materials will be circulated in advance.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/translation-workshop-with-rachael-mcgill-tickets-128044666043
4. We are delighted to invite you to a series of online seminars entitled 'Genèse, illustration, traduction et prix littéraires : Autour de l’œuvre de Mohale Mashigo’. The seminars will be broadcast live each Thursday on the ARIEL YouTube channel (link https://youtu.be/SUce1sHqKM8).
Programme (Paris time)
Thursday 12 November 2020
Chair: Catherine Delesse (University of Lorraine)
17h30-18h00 Véronique Tadjo - ‘Afrique du Sud, Afrique de l’Ouest, regards croisés’
18h15-18h45 Julie Chansel (Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme, Montpellier) - La bande-dessinée sud-africaine : une création d’une extraordinaire vitalité qui peine à trouver des débouchés’
Thursday 19 November 2020
Chair: Cédric Courtois (University of Lille)
17h30-18h00 Kathie Birat (University of Lorraine) - 'Through the lens of speculative fiction: Seeing South Africa through the short story in Mohale Mashigo's Intruders'.
18:15-18:45 Richard Samin (University of Lorraine) - 'Mohale Mashigo's The Yearning: vindicating African storytelling in post-transitional South Africa'
Thursday 26 November 2020
Chair: Marilyne Brun (University of Lorraine)
17h30-18h00 Lorena Rizzo (University of Basel) - 'Women, photography and orature in 20th-century Namibia'
18h15-18h45 Cédric Courtois (University of Lille)- '"Remember that others have walked this path before you": Writing (about) Trauma in Yejide Kilanko's Daughters Who Walk This Path (2012), Mohale Mashigo's The Yearning (2016) and Una's Becoming Unbecoming (2015)'
Thursday 3 December 2020
Chair: Monica Latham (University of Lorraine)
17h30-18h15 Mohale Mashigo - 'On the Genesis of my work: from inspiration to publication'
18:15-19:00 Mohale Mashigo in conversation with Richard Samin, Kathie Birat and Cédric Courtois
Thursday 10 December 2020
Chair: Céline Sabiron (University of Lorraine)
18h00-18h45 Sylvie Ducas (University of Paris-Est Créteil)
18h45-19h30 Barbara Schmidt, Noémie Didier and Hana Abdelsalam (University of Lorraine) - ‘Traduire la culture africaine anglophone : enjeux et défis’
Questions asked in the YouTube comments section will be relayed by a moderator via the ARIEL Facebook and Twitter accounts:
https://www.facebook.com/ResidenceARIEL
For more information about the ARIEL writer’s residency: https://ariel.univ-lorraine.fr/
5. We invite proposals for a special issue of Seminar on the topic of "Being In/Human: Normativity, Precarity, and Relationality".
Throughout the past decade, scholars in critical race, queer, disability, and animal studies such as Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Mel Y. Chen, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Jasbir K. Puar, or Dinesh Wadiwel have grappled with questions of what constitutes default forms of humanness, how these are upheld and by whom, as well as whether humanity has a future. Indeed, such inquiries question the ways in which humanness is linked to productivity, autonomy, and the ability to manifest normative bodily features as well as identity markers determining whose is legible as a “proper” body. These inquiries have illustrated that such normativity is the basis for exclusion, thus fostering a deeper understanding of how, in certain contexts, some subjects are understood as disposable, replaceable, or unworthy of care, and how they are denied access to certain rights, face objectification, and are exploited.
In order to address this normativizing power underpinning the concept of being human, this special issue seeks to take an anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-violence, feminist-queer approach, in order to trace how concepts of non-normativity allow a critical interrogation of the category of humanness itself. The issue proposes that the anti-ableist queer ethics of “inhumanism” (Eunjung Kim, 2015) problematizes the glorification of the category of the human as powerful, sovereign, bounded, and agentic. Kim’s notion of “inhumanism” focuses on the fundamental questions of what it means to be human and why the category itself inscribes sets of capacities and characteristics that render only certain bodies and modes of existence recognizable, valuable, and worthy of rights and protection.
Through the notion of “being in/human”, this special issue seeks to explore ideas of un/becoming human and their relatedness to social and cultural power structures. Foregrounding relationality, the editors encourage submissions that consider whether and how individuals are able to persist against the dictates of productivity and the aggressive human expectation to be accommodated by the world. How might becoming in/human allows us to exist in different ways and explore alternative forms of sociality and kinship? How can theoretical, literary, filmic, and artistic approaches, such as, for example, those of May Ayim, Sheri Hagen, Angelina Maccarone, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Hans-Christian Schmid, Ulrich Seidl, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Maria Speth, Antje Rávic Strubel, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Juli Zeh, enable us to resist the ongoing precarization of bodies and the demand for agency, sovereignty, and productivity? How may being in/human, and the subjectivities and artistic renditions going with it, pose a productive challenge to (homo- or hetero-)normative, cis, able-bodied, white, middle class constructions of the consumer citizen subject? Can different textual and contextual figurations challenge the status of humanity as a locus of sovereignty and power, open possibilities for new imaginations of being in the world, and underscore the limitations of notions of agency and ability?
We seek approaches to notions of in/humanism across media, cultural traditions, and historical periods of the German-speaking world as they engage with analytical frameworks that emerge out of disciplines such as feminist, gender, critical race, queer, Indigenous, and disability studies to interrogate the possibility of objecthood and in/humanism as an antisocial mode that underscores a refusal to become what society demands.
Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
- processes of othering
- ontological reimaginings
- objectification and dehumanization
- agency and sovereignty
- dis/ability
- passivity, unproductivity and refusal
- non/belonging
- queer modes of kinship and sociality
- relationality with land and locatedness
- non/binarity
- im/mobility, migration, displacement
- climate change and its effects
Please submit 300-word abstracts and short biographies (max. 150 words) to Simone Pfleger (pfleger@ualberta.ca) and Maria Roca Lizarazu (M.RocaLizarazu@bham.ac.uk) by January 15, 2021. Depending on the outcome of the editorial review of the abstracts, full manuscripts (not exceeding 8,000 words) will be invited for peer review. The deadline for the submission of first drafts of articles will be July 1, 2021.
Additionally, the editors are planning on hosting a symposium and writing workshop in August 2021 to provide accepted proposal authors with the opportunity to engage more deeply with some of the theoretical concepts that inform the notion of in/humanness and to receive feedback on their essays. The symposium will also feature a keynote address and an invited artist. Please note that authors are expected to participate in the symposium if their proposals are accepted by the editors.
