Living in Translation: Trans/national Mobilities and Multilingualism

Catalog description

Current and historical voluntary, forced, and induced migrations demand we reflect on how we think about languages, as well as the persistent changes we make to language. Translation is one of the changes we encounter daily. This course discusses the ways that thinking in/of translation alters and facilitates our reading, writing, and interpretation. It considers multilingualism alongside the cannibal, a disruptor and figure of linguistic alterity. Our aim is to think about the authors’ and texts’ trans/national movements as we generate questions about mobilities, language, and decoloniality, as well as how they manifest in cultural productions. Materials include novels, short stories, essays, musical recordings, visual art, and film. Authors include Edwidge Danticat, Haruki Murakami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Gloria Anzaldúa among others, with texts in transit between Brazil, Germany, Haiti, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, Turkey, etc.