Translating the City: Cartographies of Cultural Contact and Change
Seminar Organizer(s):
- Regina Galasso (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Evelyn Scaramella (Manhattan College)
Cities are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters, and languages have a significant role in shaping the urban experience. Both predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a theoretical point of departure, this seminar examines the dynamics of translation in urban spaces and the constructions of imaginative geographies. Translation, in this sense, is not solely a linguistic matter, but more broadly a sensory experience that manifests its traces and residues in music, visual media, architecture, and literature. How do the languages of cities influence the process of both writing and translating? How does travel between cities stimulate creative interaction and encourage acts of translation? What is the role of multilingualism in the city? During periods of cultural conflict, transformation, and political instability, how are translation practices used strategically in urban areas? This seminar invites papers that will expand our understanding of the relation between travel, translation, and the city through a variety of critical, theoretical, and cultural frameworks.
Paper topics might address:
- perceptions of place
- translation of spatial practices
- representations of the metropolis
- self-translation and the function of translators
- the translation of and interaction between different media and disciplines
- cultural encounters between East/West, North/South, center/periphery
- translation in the (post)colonial city
- cosmopolitan, transnational, and transatlantic urban zones
- transhistorical studies
- translation and conflict
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: city, (post)colonialism, cosmopolitanism, fiction, film, poetry, transatlantic, translation, translator, transnationalism, travel, urban studies, visual art