Translation as Resistance
Monday, September 30, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:15 PM EDT
Monday, September 30th (12:00-1:15pm) on zoom, Women and Gender Studies in collaboration with the Cheuse International Writers Center present: Translation as Resistance, a panel discussion on politics and practices, decolonization, and feminist solidarities in translation with Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Kavita Bhanot, and Emek Ergun.
Register on Mason 360 to receive the zoom link: https://mason360.gmu.edu/WGS/rsvp_boot?id=2271949
Alternatively, you can email Holly Mason Badra: Hmason2@gmu.edu to receive the zoom link.
Panelist bios:
Kavita Bhanot is a writer, translator, editor, researcher and organiser. She wrote the landmark essay ‘Decolonise not Diversify’ in 2015. She is the editor of three short-story collections, including Too Asian, not Asian Enough (Tindal Street, 2011) and The Book of Birmingham (Comma, 2018), and co-editor of Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis, 2022) with translator Jeremy Tiang. Her translation of Anjali Kajal’s Hindi stories Ma is Scared and Other Stories, winner of a PEN Translates Award in 2021, was published with Comma Press in 2023 and Penguin India in 2024. Kavita founded and co-organises Literature Must Fall and Jaag: Panjabi and Pahari-Pothwari Language and Literature Festival in Birmingham. She is currently writing a book Literature Must Fall: Resisting Literary Supremacy (Pluto Press) and teaches Creative Writing at Birmingham University.
Emek Ergun is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her first book, Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation was published in 2023. Ergun is a feminist translator and her most recent published translations include the Turkish translation of Octavia Butler’s classic speculative novel Kindred (2019) and the English co-translation titled The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics (2022).
Kareem James Abu-Zeid is an award-winning translator of authors from across the Arab world. His most recent translation is the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s No One Will Know You Tomorrow: Selected Poems 2014 – 2024 (Yale Margellos, Nov. 2024). He has received the Sarah Maguire Prize, PEN Center USA's translation prize, Poetry Magazine's translation prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and an NEA translation grant, among other honors, and has twice been a finalist for the PEN America Translation Prize (once in poetry and once in prose). He lives in the countryside just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
