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Workshop: Visualizing African-Asian Worlds

Open to the NYU Abu Dhabi community and by invitation.

March 2nd 2024
Location: NYUAD Arts Center, Screening Room
Start Time: 10:00

March 3rd 2024
Location: NYUAD Arts Center, Screening Room
Start Time: 10:00

Convened by Shobana Shankar (SBU), Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (NYU), and David Ludden (NYU).

We bring together filmmakers, artists, and an interdisciplinary group of researchers for a two-day workshop to develop a methodological language and critically engage overlapping public cultures. Given NYU’s long-term investments in thinking through visual cultures and creative research across geographies, the global NYU network is ideal for this exploration of Africa-Asia visual and material cultural production.

In this workshop, we propose to delve into the methodologies of Africa-Asia studies and public cultures that have blossomed beyond academic scholarship to shape and influence them. Specifically, we turn to ways cinema and other visual arts have been utilized as a way to engage economic, social, political, and cultural connections between and across the African and Asian continents.

This workshop is organized by the NYU Global Asia Program in New York and sponsored by NYUAD Humanities Research Fellowships for the Study of the Arab World as part of our collaborative effort to establish the study of Afro-Asia Interactions as a field of study integrating Arts and Humanities disciplines.

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

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.

The Global Asia Podcast is back for another season!

Podcast cover photo with Harshana Rambukwella

The Global Asia Podcast is back!

We kick off this academic year with an interview with Harshana Rambukwella, one of our researchers. Listen here.

We talked to Harshana about his journey as a scholar of Asia, as well as his recent research project. Harshana shared his personal experience in the 2022 aragayala (people’s struggle) that took place in Sri Lanka, how the popular protests came to be, as well as his thoughts on the resilience of Sri Lankan democracy. We also discussed Harshana’s upcoming plans and courses.

Harshana Rambukwella is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar with an interest in the intersections between literature, history, aesthetics, and nationalism in South Asia. He is also a sociolinguist with interest in critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Harshana is the author of the Politics and Poetics of Authenticity (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2 and the Journal of Asian Studies and Interventions and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Harshana is currently working on a project on the ‘cultural life of democracy,’ looking at democracy in ‘everyday life’ as expressed in cultural and aesthetic artifacts. This work is partly funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and he also serves as a Project Fellow on the Reversing the Gaze team — an interdisciplinary multi-sited project attempting to interrogate how insights from the postcolonial world can be usefully employed in the analysis of populism and anti-democratic thinking in Europe.

Stay tuned for the next episode.