[Commlist] CFP: Troubling Translation(s) conference

CFP: Troubling Translation(s)

University of Pennsylvania, February 21-22, 2020.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Advanced Research in Global 
Communication, Program for Comparative Literature and Theory, Department 
of South Asia Studies, Department of Religious Studies, and South Asia 
Center invite graduate students of all stages to consider translation as 
concept, practice, and method. Our discussions will be oriented around 
the constructive consideration of written work submitted by presenters 
prior to this conference. They will be driven by the following questions:

1. How do we move beyond the familiar conceptualisation of translation 
as a logo-centric, singular, uni-directional event to discern its 
multidirectional, multiform, and processual dimensions?

2. How does the multidirectional quality of translation as process 
involve its subject and object? How does subjectivity shape 
translations, and how do subjects translate themselves?

3. In what ways do translations form and become formed by their 
spatiotemporal context? How do they challenge contemporary notions of 
sociopolitical and cultural formations?

The conference is interested in expansive interpretations of translation 
across space and time. Scholarship across the disciplines has challenged 
and moved beyond frameworks of hybridity, multiculturalism, and 
syncretism for exploring processes of change and exchange. How have 
broader spatial, temporal, and material contexts shaped the practical 
and conceptual concerns of translation? Finbarr B. Flood has conceived 
translation as a dynamic and multivalent framework capable of accounting 
for material and
intellectual transformation and exchange in the premodern period. More 
recently, Francesca Orsini has shown how translations within 
“multilingual locals” generate “worlds” specific to them. How do these 
concerns lead into the contemporary context? Scholars such as Stuart 
Hall and Saba Mahmood have considered translation’s relationship to 
conceptions of racialization and liberal certitude respectively. While 
Lawrence Venuti has addressed the question of the translator’s 
invisibility apropos their text, Talal Asad
questions the hermeneutical exercise of interpretation and translation, 
drawing our attention, among other things, to “untranslatability.”

We welcome papers that critically examine translation in and across 
forms, bodies, languages, media, the visual and performing arts, and 
religions. Papers may address a range of practices, themes, or concerns. 
How, for example, did translation figure in the Islamicate and Indic 
cultural systems of the premodern period? What has been the role of 
translation, broadly understood, in negotiating relations between 
non-hegemonic and hegemonic forms across history and geography? In what 
ways have translations, as events, been put to political or social use, 
for example in Latin America or in the present North American context? 
Moreover,
how have agents and bodies relied on translation and/or 
untranslatability to trouble the larger sociocultural systems of which 
they are a part? Such questions constitute some of the broad spectrum of 
concerns the conference intends to address.

Guidelines for submissions:

Please submit a 350-word abstract outlining your topic along with a 
title and your name, institution, and year of study by November 4, 2019. 
Limited grants may be available to supplement travel costs and can be 
requested via a Google Form during abstract submission. Accepted 
presenters should submit their final drafts by February 7th, 2020 so as 
to provide sufficient time for review
prior to the conference. Conference applications should be submitted via 
this Google Form: https://tinyurl.com/PennTT2020.

Questions may be directed to (penntranslations /at/ gmail.com).

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