GCLR 2021/2022 Distinguished Vistor: Dr. Emily Apter (NYU)
The GCLR is pleased to announce our 2021/2022 Distinguished Visitor will be Dr. Emily Apter, the Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at NYU, who joins us virtually this Spring.
On Monday, May 23, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. she gave a lecture, titled "Interpreters in Court: Diplomacy, Justice, and Untranslatability in Katie Kitamura's Intimacies".
This talk considered the case of the professional interpreter as, on the one hand, a fixed structure of the international court - a neutral part of the machinery, an interpassive agent of transparency and justice dispensation - and on the other hand, as a subject mired in force-fields of affect, prone to disorientation linguistically and socially. Katie Kitamura’s best-selling novel Intimacies, about a translator involved in the trial of a war criminal at the International Court in the Hague, focuses on how living in the swirl of translated words and worlds unmoors the translator's ethical centeredness. Drawing on her
own work as a theorist of the "Untranslatable," Prof. Apter looked at how untranslatabilities operate in the novel; distributing and redirecting agency in the courtroom, contributing overall to the fluidity of the law, and expanding the parameters, between law and literature, of how we define what a language is, especially in its capacity as a system of justice. Please check back soon for a link to the recording of her talk.
There are still a few spots open in Professor Apter's seminar "Towards a Theory of Reparative Translation" (Seminar), taking place on Tuesday, May 24 from 10:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. The seminar focuses on the following concepts:
How do we rethink translation theory in response to the imperatives of racial justice movements? In the wake of debates around reparations and restitution? How can translation repair the damages of cultural violation and appropriation? How does the critic redress what Spivak calls “translation-as-violation? Or traditions of policing and social harming in language? These are some of the questions that we will address in this informal seminar session drawing on specific translation case studies across media.
For Tuesday's zoom link and reading list please contact Rachel Feldman: gclr@complit.ucsb.edu
Past Distiguished Visitors