About this Event
Prof Emily Apter: Theorizing “Global Criticality” and the Politics of Just Translation
6-7.30pm, Lecture Theatre 1, Bush House, King's College London
Prof Emily Apter is giving the keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities, King's College London. This lecture is open to the public.
"Translation and justice, the focus of my book What is Just Translation? Changing Languages in the Political Present, engages Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “global criticality” as a rubric for a vision of language politics that straddles the fields of law, global language policy, non-monolingual pedagogies and reparations applied to forms of linguistic injustice and cultural appropriationism. I associate “global criticality” with translational workarounds - ways of working micropolitically with language and intermedial forms of expression. These microforms stand in contradistinction to one-size-fits-all paradigms or “isms” that are anchored in colonial Euro-chronology and beholden to reductive bipolarities between major and minor, metropole and periphery, written and performative. As a micropolitics of language, “global criticality” flows into Spivak’s notion of “living translation:” a triple play on living with translation, living life in translation, and “live” translation, which vivifies life itself."
Biography
Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Since 2000 she has edited the book series Translation/Transnation with Princeton University Press. Essays have appeared in New Literary History, October, Public Culture, Crisis and Critique, History and Theory, Diacritics, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Critique, Les Temps qui Restent, Representations, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, Esprit Créateur and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017–18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University and in 2003–2004 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. In 2022 she co-edited and introduced Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Living Translation, a collection of Spivak’s contributions to translation theory. Her book What is Just Translation? Changing Languages in the Political Present is nearing completion. Her next book project, on the conceptualization of the unborn (or “prepersons”) is provisionally titled Conception: The Laws.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bush House, 30 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
