A New Approach to World Literature, Trans-temporal and Trans-cultural Translation

A New Approach to World Literature, Trans-temporal and Trans-cultural Translation

Tammy Lai-MIng Ho

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
21 February 2024
12.00 – 13.30
A6-006
With Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (Editor-in-Chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal)

A light lunch will be served.

This talk offers a new lens through which to consider World Literature from what I call a ‘trans-temporal and trans-cultural translation’ perspective. I argue that texts that have undergone this process exhibit characteristics that other texts, straightforwardly translated into other languages, may lack. The texts that have been trans-temporally and trans-culturally translated can be regarded as ‘exemplary’ World Literature texts.

This process of trans-temporal and trans-cultural translation is not only observed in poetry but also in other genres. Most of the texts discussed would have some relationship with the Chinese language, and this will draw attention to the centrality of China and Chinese texts in the study of World Literature. While the topic of World Literature continues to be a fertile field of exploration for students, readers and scholars, my talk contributes an original theory, centring on translation and cross-cultural interpretations, to the field.

This talk would/could engage students with backgrounds in either/both Chinese or/and Southeast Asian backgrounds. I will discuss the possibilities of finding such intricate connecting points beyond the confines of Chinese/Southeast Asian literature in the field of World Literature.

Aging humans in the Anthropocene: Rethinking a much talked about global challenge

Aging humans in the Anthropocene: Rethinking a much talked about global challenge

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
11 September 2023
16.30 – 18.00
A4-008, The Reading Room
With Alexandra Tragaki (Harokopio University)

Ten months ago, on November 15th 2022, the world population reached the 8 billion milestone, only 11 years after the population had hit 7 billion people. Though at a decelerated pace, due to declining fertility rates almost everywhere around the world, global population continues to increase, and will most probably reach 10 billion sometime by 2050. Today demographers worry less about the growth rate of the total population and more about aging and declining populations. Surprisingly, the nations with shrinking populations are not necessarily European. Deaths currently outpace births across large swaths of Asia. In 2022, alone, China lost a population the size of San Francisco (-850.000 persons), Japan the size of Las Vegas (about 600.000). Two out of three Asian countries and seven out of ten countries globally experience fertility rates below replacement level. Demographers’ attention has thus turned to the growth rate of specific age-groups. Societies have never before had so many different age clusters whose divergent, even conflicting, needs require a rethink of policy formulation on demographic issues. The climate crisis has indicated that the framework necessary for an unprecedented global challenge needs to involve adaptation, mitigation, and resilience. It may offer a blueprint to tackle challenges of aging societies thereby ensuring that people and institutions ‘age better’ and that policies help build resilience by developing both a longer-term perspective and policy learning framework.

Groundless Existence: Ethics and Agency in Contemporary Migrant literature

Groundless Existence: Ethics and Agency in Contemporary Migrant literature

Portrait of Palvan Malreddy

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
5th October 2023.
17.00.
A4-008, The Reading Room

With Pavan Malreddy (Goethe University Frankfurt).

Conventional debates on the figure of the migrant – in its myriad iterations as the displaced, diasporic subject, exile, refugee – have tended to focus on the process of the movement itself, the political and economic conditions that led to such movement, the egregious conditions aroused by such movement, and the trials and tribulations of the subjects who are subjected to such movement. Accordingly, the debates on migrants and moving subjects in literary studies follow a linear trajectory of the migrant figure arriving from a point of origin (typically in the global periphery) to a destination (typically the Global North). This unreflective imagination of the migrant figure has been the source of xenophobia and other cultural anxieties all over the world. This talks challenges this standardized view of the migrant as ethnocentric, nostalgic, home-bound, or obsessed with home culture and customs by arguing that – through a selection of literary and cultural productions from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – new migrant figures do not seek to arrive from a point of origin to a point of destination. Instead, they reject the very idea of home and enter a world of liminal permenance, proclaiming their right to un-belong both from the homes they have departed from, and the destinations they have arrived at.

Pavan Malreddy born and raised in South Indian villages, teaches English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. He specialises in 20th and 21st century comparative Anglophone literatures & cultures with a regional focus on East Asia, Africa, and South Asia and with a thematic focus on conflicts, communal bonds, insurgencies, populism, public life and migrancy. He has authored essays on figures and themes as wide-ranging as Aung San Suu Kyi, Salman Rushdie, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Indian cinema, Brexit, terrorism, and the civil war in Burma, among others. He has interviewed/ hosted prominent novelists and theorists such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Arundhati Roy, Yann Martel, Homi K. Bhabha, Mohsin Hamid, Tom McCarthy, among others. He co-edits Kairos, and serves on the advisory board of Philosophy, Politics and Critique and The Journal of Aterity Studies and World Literature, among others. His recent books include co-edited volumes Writing Brexit (2022, Routledge), Violence in South Asia (2020, Routledge), Narratives of the War on Terror (2022, Routledge) and a monograph Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2013, in press). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled At Home on the Road.

 

Musical Crossings: Re/semblance in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai

Musical Crossings: Re/semblance in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Shanghai

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
27th April 2023. 17.00.
The Reading Room, NYUAD Art Gallery (A4-008).

With Tejaswini Niranjana.

Journeys involving music, migration and modernity have been central to my thinking about cultural practice in the last couple of decades. From African-Asian crossings in the Caribbean to Hindustani music in Mumbai to Indian-Chinese musical crossings, these journeys traverse issues of nationhood and subject-formation as they take shape in the global south. As I explore these trajectories of music and voice production, I try not to use the vocabulary of fusion and multi-culturalism which tend to flatten into easy resolution a host of complicated histories of connection and dis-connection. The focus of my talk is on Saath-Saath, a project that brings together vocalists, instrumentalists and a poet from India, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. These artists met from 2016 to 2020 across these different locations and made music together as they experimented with language and melody. Their album was released in 2021 and was nominated for the Grammy Award. The docufilm, Movement Traces (dir. Surabhi Sharma, 2021) maps the musicians’ journey. During this talk I will play songs from the Saath-Saath album as well as clips from the film.

Speaker bio:
Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, and Dean, Online Programmes at Ahmedabad University. From 2016-2021 she was Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary PhD programme from 2000-2012.

Professor Niranjana is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke UP, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (Duke UP, 2020). Her most recent edited volumes include Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Orient Blackswan, 2015) with Wang Xiaoming; and Music, Modernity and Publicness in India (Oxford University Press, 2020).

She is curator of the Saath-Saath Project, a musical collaboration between Indian and Chinese performers: http://saathsaathmusic.com, and producer of three documentary films based on her music research (directed by Surabhi Sharma).

A View from Asia: Changing Global Demography

With Tragaki Alexandra.

Postponed.

Home to 6 out of 10 living persons, Asia is the region the most demographically heterogeneous. The Asian population ages rapidly; however regional differences in the level and speed of aging are striking. There are countries that managed to reap the first demographic dividend, others that are currently under the transition towards the fourth stage of demographic transition, while others are trying to benefit from the longevity dividend.

Demographic figures are (most often) striking; the world changes rapidly. Population size, growth rates and geographical distribution are issues discussed widely, but rarely in depth: very little is said about their implications at regional, national, or international levels. Population trends are crucial for the environment, economic growth, social cohesion as well as international relations, yet they remain largely overlooked.

In the 21st century, population concerns are very different to those of the previous century. Population-age structure is the most important factor when the perspectives of a country are examined. Increasing life expectancy has resulted in more cohorts of people that have grown up during different historical periods and shaped by very different major events, living in the same time period. Never before have our societies been as multi-generational as they currently are. Social cohesion may be at stake due to different needs and priorities, but also due to persistent age-segregation.Different cohorts age differently. Though demographic trends are very much predictable, their economic, social and environmental outcome remains uncharted. An interdisciplinary approach to address challenges emerging from unprecedented demographic changes is now more needed than ever before.

Global Crossroads presents “Ocean as Method: Two Talks on the Maritime”

Global Crossroads presents “Ocean as Method: Two Talks on the Maritime”

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.

15th February 2023.
17.00.
A6-004.

With Nishat Zaidi (Jamia Millia Islamia, India) and Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa).

This is event is organised by Global Crossroads, as part of the “Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime” event.