Translating Culture
Seventh Performance Studies International Conference
Translation, Transition, Transformation at the University of Mainz, 29 March-1 April 2001
The Cultural Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is in its second year. It is devoted to the study of cultural interfaces, transnational identities and hybrid artistic and intellectual practices. The concept of cultural translation simultaneously describes an emergent field of humanist study and elaborates a performative theory of everyday life for the global community. The task of the Cultural Translation Project is to bring together prominent international creative personalities who negotiate these multiple identities in their work to foster research and practice of cultural translation, produce relevant scholarship, and engage students in "hands-on" pedagogic experience.
For the 2001 Performance Studies Conference International Conference on Translation, Transition, Transformation, we propose to bring to Germany a panel of scholars and artists who have been involved with activities of the Cultural Translation Project to present our own works-in-progress and documentation of some of the workshop's recent projects. Thematically, our presentations will share a concern for the ways in which translation can act as a progressive or a conservative force, transcending or reifying existing national, ethnic, or disciplinary boundaries. The panel will offer a socio-critique of translation, which acts as a cognitive interface between social representations and cultural institutions of the "source" and "target" cultures. By examining the ways that translations of Darwin into French reinforce an epistemic model of science, Annie Brisset demonstrates the role of the translator as a gatekeeper of knowledge. In "Translating Truth," Laurie Beth Clark foregrounds the ethnic dimensions of credibility of confessional performances in legal, religious, psychoanalytic, and social contexts. Tomislav Longinovic describes the inherent contradictions in the process of adapting a Serbian dissident play into a Hollywood blockbuster and the concomitant narrative suppressions, erasures, promotions, and supplementations. Our work examines translations not only across linguistic, geographic, political, historical, ethnic, and gender boundaries, but also between disciplinary and social compartments, from science to theater, from political act to commercial enterprise, or from courtroom to bedroom.
Our panel make up is multi-ethnic, multi-disciplinary, and multi-national Annie Brisset, Canadian, scholar and translator, professor of Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, author of A Socio-Critique of Translation Theatre and Alterity in Quebec; Tomislav Longinovic, Post-Yugoslav American, fiction writer and theoretician, professor of Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, author of Borderline Culture The Politics of Identity in Four Twentieth-Century Slavic Novels; Laurie Beth Clark, Jewish New Yorker, artist and administrator, professor of Non-Static Forms at the University of Wisconsin, creator and producer of videos, installations and performances.
By and large, our presentations will be in English, although we expect that each will include some components in other official conference languages, especially French, and some components in non-conference languages, such as Serbo-Croatian and Yiddish. We will need a VHS NTSC player and a minimum presentation period of two hours for the presentations by Brisset, Clark, and Longinovic, from whom we have explicit commitments. (If the panel is accepted, we would like to have the opportunity to include additional workshop participants to strengthen the international dimension of the panel, as well as its racial diversity, such as Shanti Kumar, who works on the impact of satellite television in India or Li Chiao-Ping, a Chinese American dancer who recently choreographed a translation of a short story by Argentinian writer Luisa Valenzuela. If we can add additional panelists, please allow 20-30 minutes per speaker).