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.

For all the tea in China: Economic and environmental ramifications of tea history with George van Driem

For all the tea in China: Economic and environmental ramifications of tea history with George van Driem

The Tale of Tea book cover

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
21 November 2023
15.30 – 16.30
A4-008, The Reading Room
With George van Driem (University of Bern)

The tale of of tea, Camellia sinensis, spans thousands of years and cannot be told in an hour. This tea talk will therefore present a number of selected highlights from the history of tea. How did tea become a cultivated plant, and how did this cultigen reach China? How was tea subsequently transformed in China? What were some of the economic and environmental ramifications of tea on the history of China and of the world? The tea trade is responsible for paper money, the Opium Wars and the existence of Hong Kong. Tea was a decisive factor in theActs of Navigation, the Anglo-Dutch wars and the American war of independence. The economy of tea was crucial to the economy and the military defences of Tángand Sòng dynasty China and moulded the evolution of Chinese art and culture. The tea trade with the West played a role in sowing the seeds of the Tàipíng rebellion and so ultimately of the Chinese revolution led by Dr.Sun Yat-sen and the subsequent Communist rebellion led by Máo Zédōng. Amore thorough account is provided in the book The Tale of Tea.

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.

 

Global China: Art as Performance in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene

Global China: Art as Performance in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.
4th May 2023. 16.00 – 17.30.
With Jane Chin Davidson (Professor of Art History/Global Cultures, California State University, San Bernardino).

In the global expansion of contemporary art, Chinese artists have adopted the embodied practices of the performance medium to engage with the human subject in response to the environmental exigencies of the Anthropocene. Artists have juxtaposed the human subject with China’s changing landscapes across Hong Kong and Taiwan, using performance as an aesthetic form for restoring polluted industrial sites in Taipei as well as for documenting ecological loss along the Yangtze river in the development of hydroelectric power with the Three Gorges Dam. As an integral component of conceptual art in today’s transnational contexts, performance serves a unique sociopolitical function through its ability to showcase different perspectives for understanding life in the climate generation.