In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes about the deaths of her two sons in a language of striking restraint. Her movement between English-language literary writing and Chinese-language interviews further complicates the reader’s desire to locate a stable private person behind the prose. Different languages, translations, and cultural contexts produce different versions of the author who appears at once intimate and remote. Li’s case introduces a broader question central to this seminar: how do processes of translation shape the figures of writers, artists, and cultural creators across languages and media? 

This seminar approaches translation as a condition of transcultural circulation and self-transformation. Drawing on Maya Boutaghou’s theorization of multilingual subject and translation, we understand translation as a process through which new systems of meaning emerge. As Boutaghou argues, “the forced imposition of a colonial language implies a hidden new semiosis, one that is rooted in a process of translation that transforms the act of interpreting any artifact, be it literary, musical, visual, or spatial” (Boutaghou 2024, 5). Translation thus becomes a site where languages, cultural memories, and artistic forms are continuously transformed. Building on this insight, we examine how creative figures emerge through interactions among texts, translations, images, performances, adaptations, and audiences. Across multilingual and transnational contexts, writers and artists move among literary languages, inherited languages, and cultural traditions. These movements are often interpreted through frameworks of authenticity, assimilation, hybridity, or cosmopolitanism (Bhabha 1994; Lionnet and Shih 2005). Translation complicates these categories by revealing the persistence of what Emily Apter calls the “untranslatable”, or the linguistic and cultural remainder that resists complete transfer while enabling cultural forms to generate new meanings (Apter 2013). A translated text, an adapted performance, or a circulated image therefore creates new relationships among creators and audiences.

We invite papers examining translation as an aesthetic, linguistic, visual, and embodied practice. How do translations reshape perceptions of literary and artistic identity? How do writers, performers, and cultural figures appear differently across linguistic communities, visual regimes, and institutional contexts? The seminar welcomes work across literary studies, visual culture, performance studies, Asian studies, Francophone studies, postcolonial studies, and transnational cultural studies.

By placing translation at the center of transcultural circulation, this seminar investigates how authors and artists become legible across national boundaries while resisting reduction to any linguistic or cultural origin. It approaches cultural identity as an ongoing process of translation and transformation.