Dartmouth Events

Reparative Translation and Re-appropriation: In the Groove of Arabic Art and Philosophy

Emily Apter, New York University

Tuesday, May 25 at 2 PM

Drawing on artist Kader Attia's notion of repair as "not repairable" yet capable of producing emancipatory forms of cultural re-appropriation, this talk will investigate some of the heuristic challenges confronting the comparative humanities that involve questions of reparation (wound-dressing, healing, care, amends for long-durational conditions of racial and colonial affliction, unfreedoms of speech), and the irreparable damage of theft by appropriationism.  We will consider several critical convergences between Black Critical Race Theory and Arabic translation theory (Kilito, Benabdelali, Benmakhlouf), with reference to examples in poetics and fiction that qualify as reparative translation praxis.

Emily Apter is a Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature 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 Un-translatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).  The current project: What is Just Translation? takes up questions of translation and law, sexual safety, and transmediality.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dartmouth.zoom.us/j/97543131372?pwd=cHFlSTExNzdQNitxTmc5S3p2SkhwUT09

Meeting ID: 975 4313 1372

Passcode: 818746

This Talk is Free and Open to the Public

For Questions, please email tarek.el-ariss@dartmouth.edu

Sponsors: The Leslie Center for the Humanities, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature.