All posts by Maria Elizabeth Rodriguez Beltran

Decoloniality Workshop Series: “Decolonizing Nation-State Narratives in Angola and Mozambique”

By: Jeong Eun Annabel We

On December 4th, 2017, the Decoloniality Workshop series kicked off with Dionisio da Silva Pimenta’s (Sociology, Federal University of São Carlos) work in progress. Entitled “Decolonizing Nation-State Narratives in Angola and Mozambique,” the paper engaged the concept of coloniality and works of Frantz Fanon to think through the post-independence nation-state building struggles of Mozambique and Angola.

Pimenta posed the question of how cold war geopolitics materially shaped the long civil wars of party oppositions in Angola and Mozambique, and what examples of decolonizing practices can be found in people’s cultural resistance to the party focused nation-state projects. During the workshop discussion, participants proposed different approaches to thinking about how temporality and spatiality were crucial features of coloniality and nation border-drawing in Angola and Mozambique. By connecting the scramble for Africa with the economic hegemony of Cold War interventions, the discussion took a turn to probe colonial spatialization and ethnicization of nation-state politics that is emphasized in Pimenta’s engagement with coloniality and geopolitics. 

The workshop’s soundtrack was set to the work of rappers that Pimenta examined, MCK (Angola) and Azagaia (Mozambique).

The Decoloniality Worshop (organized by Rafael Vizcaíno [Comparative Literature, Rutgers University]) is a space for junior scholars to receive constructive feedback in a relaxed community setting. It builds upon recent graduate-student-organized events at Rutgers University around the project of the critique of modernity/coloniality. Most recently, the inaugural Decoloniality Roundtable took place in May 2017. In March 2016, the Urban (De)Coloniality and Literature conference was held as the Program in Comparative Literature Biennial Graduate Student Conference.

 The workshop has a complete lineup for the Spring 2018 semester and is in the plan of continuing in 2018-19. For more information, visit the workshop’s website at https://decolonialityworkshop.wordpress.com 

‘El Hermoso Juego’, or ‘The Beautiful Game’: Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionista Poetics and the Translation of Surrealist Automatic Poetry

A Report on Josué Rodriguez’s Colloquium Presentation
by Rudrani Gangopadhyay

On November 30th, Josué Rodriguez presented the second colloquium of the 2017-2018 school year on Vicente Huidobro’s Creacionista Poetics and the Translation of Surrealist Automatic Poetry. He began by providing a brief introduction of his dissertation project, tentatively titled “In Search of the Magic Equivalent: Colonial Critiques and Stylistic Appropriations of Surrealism in the Latin American Vanguards,” and then moved on to present his first chapter. Josué’s presentation on Creacionista poetics delved more into questions of influence, originality, and translation, rather than literary history.

Creacionismo was a short-lived experimental literary movement among Spanish writers in France, Spain, and Latin America, founded by Vicente Huidobro (1893 – 1948) in Paris around 1916. Huidobro was a Chilean poet who was simultaneously a Romantic, a surrealist, a cubist, a futurist, and was described as “a translator of European aesthetics and avant-garde influences”. For followers of Creationism, the poet’s role was to create a personal imagined world rather than describing the world of nature. This was achieved by bold juxtaposition of images and metaphors, and an use of original vocabulary consisting of idiosyncratically combined words. Josué argues that this movement, engaged inherently with notions of originality and genealogy of poetry, is one that translates other movements and therefore renders poetry as truly transnational and translinguistic.

Surrealism is an important influence on the Creationist movement, and in fact, Huidobro claims ownership of the surrealist style of automatic writing. Josué envisions Creacionismo as a part of a long-term teleological arc engaged with other avant-garde movements, and as a natural continuation of the larger movement of poetry. Like Walter Benjamin, Huidobro believed the task of the translator is to carry a text beyond borders and languages, and aimed to achieve precisely that in his own work. Josué shared  fascinating images of the first issue of the Creacion magazine (1921), and Huidobro’s statement in the same. The issue contained various kinds of texts (poetry, prose, musical scores) in different languages, and was truly a global text that aligned well with the universal scope of Creacionismo as imagined by Huidobro.

Josué concluded his presentation with a very interesting close reading of one of Huidobro’s short stories, ‘El Hermoso Juego’ or ‘The Beautiful Game’. The story, which is a sly criticism of surrealism, never explicitly mentions the movement, but its presence is easy to detect. In an audacious move, Huidobro engages with surrealism in a way that simultaneously critiques and celebrates it. The use of automatic poetry within the story is one of its noteworthy aspects. The use of automaticity as a strategy for textual production here allows a sense universal accessibility to the process of creation to prevail. The story also uses tropes of order and plays in deeply interesting ways that correlate to theorizations about creation as well as translation. Josué’s work focused on Creacionismo’s inherent need for translation rather than notions of originality and periodization. Huidibro’s work, he argued, is fundamentally not one movement but rather a synthesis of multiple avant-garde movements.

The presentation was followed by an enlightening round of questions and answers, pertaining particularly to anti-mimesis, and how it may relate to the process of translation. Josué also answered questions about theories of originality as well as about whether Creacionismo is somehow limiting. He stated that he would place poetry and translation in equal measure at the heart of poetry. Surrealism is a testimony to the fact that there is no such originality.

Congratulations to Josué on his excellent presentation! We are very thankful to him for sharing with us a slice of his fascinating work, and we look forward to hearing more about it.

Conversations on anti-colonialism

By Paulina M. Barrios

This past Monday, October 30th, Prof. Ania Loomba and Prof. Nelson Maldonado-Torres participated in a public conversation coordinated by Prof. Anjali Nerlekar with the support of the Comparative Literature and South Asian Studies Programs. The title of the conversation was Anti-colonialism and its trajectories: Postcolonial and decolonial thought, where both professors spoke of their professional trajectories and how they intersected with postcolonial studies and decolonial thought. Both had different ways of presenting their main arguments leading to a lively and dynamic conversation, provoking occasional laughter or thoughtful looks and speedy note-taking. The framework of the conversation was the course offered this semester by Prof. Nerlekar Introduction to Literary Theory, where graduate students discuss leading theorists and aim to establish a theoretical framework for their own projects.

With this in mind, Prof. Maldonado-Torres decided to move beyond the texts and trace his interactions with postcolonial studies. He began with an anecdote of how his anglo-American writing tutor in graduate school suggested that he must know postcolonial studies, leaving him feeling a bit perplexed about the assumption, and marking his first contact with its authors and theory. Moreover, he pointed out that postcolonial theory helped him frame a response to the provincialism of Western philosophy and a critique of the eurocentrism present in Puerto Rican nationalism. Similarly, Prof. Loomba was told to read postcolonial authors by a fellow academic, once her PhD studies had been completed in England. In speaking of her own trajectory she explained her parents were Marxists, described herself as a political child and a feminist from the second wave of feminism in India. It was in England that “I discovered race for the first time and realized how terribly colonialized I was, the peculiar thing in India is that you don’t see race, which now I would say is exactly the coloniality we were all taught”.

However, both argued that Postcolonial theory has limitations that may be pushed further. Prof. Maldonado-Torres focused his critique on four general limitations; it did not fully address eurocentrism, it was a theoretical movement that wasn’t grounded on current social movements, and it excluded lived experience. He tied his final critique with his own analysis of Puerto Rican nationalism, “I realized that the provincialism of Puerto Rican nationalism was matched by the complicity with colonialism of forms of knowledge that used criticism as refuge of the closed forms of repression”. Prof. Loomba responded first by emphasizing that she is not a postcolonial specialist, and that the work she has published on postcolonial studies has been as someone who uses this theory and engages with it in a critical way. She further pointed out that she would separate Edward Said from the other theorists, however, she used him to point out how postcolonial theory sometimes simplifies its analyses by not including the “traditions of patriarchy, race structures, and class structures that predated colonialism”.

Both professors closed their discussions by presenting their own proposals on how to engage with both the limitations and useful elements of Postcolonial Studies. Prof. Maldonado-Torres discussed his work in area studies, spoke against what he termed “the infantilization of area studies”, and supported the project of an academy linked to social movements. He then presented the background of the end of the Cold War and indigenous movements in the 90s as key for leading to Anibal Quijano’s term of coloniality and “to the notion that modernity and coloniality are a global system of power that orchestrates relations between different countries but also inside the different countries”. Prof. Loomba framed her response by pointing towards elements that should be rescued, such as the idea of multiple histories. However, she stated postcolonial studies were too presentist, and didn’t go sufficiently far back in their analyses. She also spoke against the American academy’s obsession with creating new fields and asked to move beyond the term ‘postcolonial studies’. She strongly urged for an inclusion of ideas that are emerging within the Third World and not use the same 4 or 5 authors, “that are taken up by American presses and canonized here”.

At the end of both presentations, there was a short question and answer session. One example of a question that came up focused on how this discussion might translate into pedagogical tools or strategies to bring decoloniality into the classroom. Both professors answered by stating two options: the first focused on strategies in the classroom, such as, working with students on a more horizontal level and leading creative efforts within the classroom; the second focused more on content, bringing in authors that are not generally discussed in American academia or constantly integrating discussions surrounding race and/or gender into courses. Both professors  ended the conversation leaving the room buzzing and inspired to productively question our own colonialisms/colonialities.

Call for Papers: “LOVE IN TRANSLATION” Graduate Student Conference 2018

LOVE IN TRANSLATION

Comparative Literature Program at Rutgers

Graduate Student Conference

March 2-3, 2018

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Keynote Speaker: Professor Sandra Bermann, Princeton University

Translation workshop by Professor Susan Bernofsky, Columbia University

CALL FOR PAPERS

The biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature seeks to understand how love figures in and is transfigured by translation. The conference invites participants to think about how love disrupts and transforms the ways in which literary imagination functions across languages, time, space, borders. Some of the questions we aim to address are: How is love translated? Can love be a methodology in translation? Is it a hindrance or is it generative? Is love a theme or a product of translation?

Graduate students interested in presenting their research at Love in Translation are asked to submit an abstract of 300 words that addresses the conference theme.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Love and the ethics of translation
  • Love and literary pedagogy as translation
  • Love in the text
  • Love, translation, popular culture
  • Love, translation, world literature
  • Love, translation, activism
  • Love, translation, gender
  • Love, translation, environment
  • Love, translation, genre
  • Love, translation, borders (textual, epistemic, geographical/geopolitical)

The deadline for paper proposals is 11:59 PM on December 15th, 2017. Please e-mail all proposals to Conference Co-Chairs Penny Yeung or Rudrani Gangopadhyay at rucomplit2018@gmail.com . All submissions should include the title of the paper, the abstract, and the name, affiliation, and email of the author.

More details about the conference can be found at the conference website.

Graduate Student Summer: Institute for World Literature 2017 session at Copenhagen

By:  Rudrani Gangopadhyay

 The 7th session of the Institute for World Literature (IWL) met at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark this Summer from July 3 through July 26, in joint partnership with Aarhus University. The four week-long program consisted of twelve two-week seminars taught by scholars trying to rethink and redefine world literature, guest lectures by Sara Danius and Madame Nielsen, colloquia for participants to share and workshop their current research, and panels on publishing and venturing out into the job market as well as working on projects with multiple scholars from varied disciplines. My own interest in the IWL arose because of its unique perspective towards the study of world literature with a global scope. Not only did my time at the Institute help me question existing notions of world literature and attempt to access it unprecedented ways, its format rendered itself particularly well to create for all the participants a thriving intellectual exchange between the attendees. as well as its institute format which I believed would render itself well to a thriving intellectual exchange between the attendees.

The two seminars I took were “Exilic Writing and the Making of World Literature” with Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London) and “Colonialism, a Multilingual Local and its Significant Geographies” with Francesca Orsini (SOAS, University of London).  Prof. Tihanov’s seminar on “Exilic Writing and the Making of World Literature” proved to be an excellent learning resource for my readings into movement, memory and identity, and enabled me to continue my inquiries into the study of cultural texts as mnemonic markers of a socio-cultural history of migration. The seminar questioned existing notions of cosmopolitans, of exilic memory, the language as well as the affective economy of exile, and tries to constitute a world literary network out of exilic writing.

Prof. Orsini’s seminar on “Colonialism, a Multilingual Local and Its Significant Geographies” was particularly relevant to my study of multilingualism and its varied impact on literary production, translation and circulation. The seminar was a way for Orsini to workshop the ideas of her ongoing project on ‘Multlingual Locals and Significant Geographies’ and see how the contents of the project could be brought into the interdisciplinary classroom. Taking the case of India’s persistent multilingualism and diverse traditions of literary production, Orsini tried to envision a system of world literature akin to Doreen Massey’s formulation on space as a “sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist”. I found the focus of both seminars on concepts of cultural translation and its role in the making of what we understand as world literature particularly fascinating. What made the seminar experiences even more interesting was the varied backgrounds from which the students in the seminar came, and therefore the very different outlooks they brought to their study. The seminars required intense work, but it helped to have access to the University of Copenhagen libraries, which included the Royal Danish Library’s collections, including the Black Diamond.

The colloquium that I was a part of was on World Cinema. Our group was made of twelve graduate students in various stages of their work. While some workshopped their chapters or prospectus, others like myself, brought to the colloquium ideas about projects. I found the experience of the presenting my own work and listening to the research of others particularly stimulating, and enjoyed myself immensely. The colloquia were a good way to meet more people working on in similar areas, and forming networks that I hope we will continue to cherish professionally and personally.

IWL also arranged for tours around Copenhagen, on land and in the canals around the city. Aside from the historical walking tours around the beautiful city, we also went on trips to Roskilde (the old Viking capital) and to Helsingor (the real-life inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Elsinore). In the latter, we were fortunate enough to see their summer time performance of Hamlet which takes place around the castle. Everyone involved enjoyed these immensely!

I am very grateful to the program in Comparative Literature for the funding I received in order to attend the Institute. It proved to be the perfect opportunity to combine an exploration of  newer ways to think about world literature as well as interacting and networking with an exciting intellectual community over the summer (in a beautiful city). It has been an invaluable experience that would no doubt enrich my literary imagination going forward.

Graduate Student Summer: Black in Europe, University of Amsterdam, 2017

By: F. Joseph Sepúlveda

After spending a few weeks traveling throughout Europe, particularly Sweden and Spain, in early June, I ended up attending the 10-day summer school program “Black Europe”, at the University of Amsterdam. Held in the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) and in collaboration with the Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues (Barcelona, Spain), the program features mostly European and North American scholars who work on race, and focuses on the investigation of how race and immigrantion has altered European society and its legal, historical, and cultural institutions. The program was for me most productive as a way to gain insight into how race and racial difference is understood within European contexts, and learning from scholars like Stephen Small, David Theo Goldberg, and Kwame Nimako through daily lecture sections was beneficial for expanding my own understanding of how non-American nations speak about (or fail to speak of) the impact and importance of black and other immigrants to the formation of Europe (although I think the program would have been more useful if broken up by smaller workshops and group discussions). Stephen Small’s work, for example, explores Black Britain’s centrality in European discourses on black civil rights and visibility, and he nicely presented the fact that even in Britain, which has the largest black population, the percentage of blacks in the nation is never as large as in the American hemisphere. However, anti-black discourse in Europe, and in Britain especially, tends to hyperbolically imagine the nation as overrun by “too many” formerly colonial black subjects.

In general terms, the program was useful for teaching three fundamental ideas about the European relation with its black populations: 1. That most European countries regard anti-black racism as an American, and particularly US American problem, and so they adapt a legal and social discourse of color-blindness that prevents coalitions to redress issues through the category of race. 2. Europe has been relatively adept at keeping black migrants outside of its nations (even in Britain the black population resides in major metropolitan areas and constituted less than 5 percent of its national demographics in 2011). 3. Unsurprisingly, important European countries like the Netherlands and Sweden disavow their role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade despite benefitting greatly from it and bankrolling its success.

In sum, the program offered an intellectually engaging ensemble of scholars who spoke about the different European approaches to thinking and resisting race, linking racial discourse with decolonial theory, and showing how to methodically think about race in the modern world. This program thus provided me with suggestions about what a more expansive trans-Atlantic framework to thinking racial formations could look like.