(Exposições – 2nd floor)vThu 9 – Sat 11 May 2019, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon)
PROGRAMME
All sessions take place in the library building
Day 1: Thursday 9th May 2019
9-10am: Registration (Lobby)
Speakers ets: Naomi Segal and Alexandra Lopes / Peter Hanenburg (centre director)
10.30-11.30: Keynote 1 (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Chair: Carla Ganito, Universidade Católica / CECC
11.30-13.00: Seminars 1 (3 x 3) (3 rms)
Cultural sharing
Chair – Cátia Ferreira, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Rekeszus + Beleza + Crawshaw (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Books in circulation
Chair – Luísa Leal Faria, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Seruya + Boucher + Rapisardi (421 – 2nd floor)
Multilingualism & translingualism
Chair – Ana Margarida Abrantes, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Kharoua/Ridouane + Amiri + Płuciennik (Timor – 1st floor)
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00-15.30: Seminars 2 (2 x 3 + SIG) (3 rms)
Conviviality in refugee experience
Chair – Adriana Martins, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Ribeiro de Menezes + Cruz + Roy (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Being French
Chair – Rita Maia, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Gallagher + O’Brien + Kahan (421 – 2nd floor)
+ Robert Crawshaw’s SIG (Sociedade Científica – 1st floor)
15.30-16.00: Tea (lobby)
16.00-17.00: Seminars 3 (3 x 2) (3 rms)
Performance, Resistance
Chair – Rita Faria, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Budzowska + Luzar (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Communality & space
Chair – Madeleine Campbell, University of Edinburgh
Speakers – Emmanouilidou + Ferreira (421 – 2nd floor)
Conviviality in Theory
Chair – Karen Bennett, Universidade Nova de Lisboa / CETAPS
Speakers – Eager + Setter (Sociedade Científica – 1st floor)
17.00: Outing
Day 2: Friday 10th May 2019
10.00-11.00: Seminars 4 (3 x 2) (3 rms)
Conviviality & music
Chair – Jorge Vaz de Carvalho, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Kim + Birbili (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Conviviality & film
Chair – Jorge Vaz de Carvalho, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Gonçalves + Vannocci Bonsi (423 – 2nd floor)
Speaking to the other – Blanchet + Calabro (Brasil – 1st floor)
11.00-11.30: Coffee (lobby)
11.30-12.30: Keynote 2 (Exposições)
Chair: Naomi Segal, Birbeck College, London
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-15.00: Seminars 5 (2 x 3 + SIG) (3 rms)
Archive & Conviviality
Chair – Joana Moura, Universidade Católica Portuguesa / CEC
Speakers – Stanković + Bukowiecki + Hipfl (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Conviviality in Visuality
Chair – Diana Gonçalves, Univ. Católica / CECC
Speakers – Di Paola + Martins + Sheng (423 – 2nd floor)
+ Heather Bradshaw-Martin’s SIG (Brasil – 1st floor)
15.00-15.30: Tea (lobby)
15.30-16.30: Keynote 3 (Exposições)
Chair: Robert Crawshaw
Policy head-to-head: Kaszynska & Vaz Pinto
16.30-18.00: Seminars 6 (2 x 3 + SIG)
Migration & Identity
Chair – Rogério Miguel Puga, Nova University / CETAPS
Speakers – Rinhaug + Milne + Anzini (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Britain in non-convivial times
Chair – Maria Zulmira Castanheira, Nova University / CETAPS
Speakers – Riaño Alonso + Osiński + Kosmalska (423 – 2nd floor)
+ Ricarda Vidal’s SIG (Brasil – 1st floor)
18.00-19.00: Book launch (lobby)
Two volumes
20.00: Conference dinner
Day 3: Saturday 11th May 2019
10.00-11.00: Seminars 7 (3 x 2) (3 rms)
Cosmopolitan Literatures
Chair – Carla Ganito, Univ. Católica Portuguesa / CECC
Speakers – Schwander + Lopes (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Decolonising the academy
Chair – Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin
Speakers – Kirkpatrick + Nowakowski + Santos (Timor)
Virtual Communities
Chair – Peter Hanenberg, Universidade Católica / CECC
Speakers – Vidal + von Petersdorff (Brasil – 1st floor)
11.00-11.30: Seminars 8 (3 x 2) (3 rms)
Afropolitanism
Chair – Patrícia Anzini, CECC
Speakers – Suarez + Horvath (Exposições – 2nd floor)
Communication & Theory
Chair – Teresa Casal, University of Lisbon / CEAUL
Speakers – Matoso + Gilbert (Timor – 1st floor)
Conviviality & the senses
Chair – Maria Cândida Cadavez, ESTHE / IHC-UNL
Speakers – Bayley + Parreira (Brasil – 1st floor)
12.30-13.30: Lunch
13.30-15.00: Keynote 4 (Exposições)
Chair – Fabíola Maurício, CECC
15.00-16.00: AGM (Exposições)
16.30-18.00: Core group
CG members only
ABSTRACTS & BIOS
in alphabetical order of speaker surname
‘Quelle mystère! Quelle contradiction!’: Exile in Atiq Rahimi’s Les Porteurs d’eau
There exists, in the post-9/11 western media, a specific and negative narrative about Afghanistan, its society and past, which questions multicultural conviviality in host countries of migrants from Afghanistan. This can also be challenged by certain translingual authors, whose works make visible in a global context their discourses on cultural stereotypes. In this paper, I will focus on works by one translingual author who introduces a new perspective challenging pejorative stereotypes obstructing the readership a convivial coexistence with Muslims from Central Asia.
Based on my study of Prix Goncourt winning author Atiq Rahimi’s publications and an interview, I argue that his literature resists strict cultural definitions set by his French readership. His latest novel Les Porteurs d’eau, published in January 2019, partially explores lives of Afghans in exile. My paper aims to analyse narratological and linguistic choices challenging the narrative’s readership. The novel, which also revolves around Tom, a former refugee and ordinary member of today’s European society, narrates in the second-person one day of his life. Already with this choice of narrative voice, Rahimi eliminates the distance between the reader and the protagonist while stepping away from the binary representation of the exotic ‘Other’. In the novel, linguistic concepts exemplify the experiences in exile. Rahimi turns to the complex composition of the future tense in Persian to draw parallels to the absurdity of Tom’s life in exile.
Overall this paper tries to elucidate the ways in which Rahimi’s literature consists of alternative narratives introducing a nuanced Muslim identity, with which the western readership could imagine to coexist in multicultural conviviality.
With her comparative study of contemporary translingual authors of Afghanistani background titled ‘Rethinking World Literature and Diasporic Writing: the Case of Afghanistani Translingual Authors Khaled Hosseini and Atiq Rahimi’, Lida Amiri researches alternative diaspora narratives published in English, French and Persian. Lida Amiri obtained her Master’s degree in literary and linguistic studies at the University of Wuppertal and was awarded various scholarships ranging from Fulbright to Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung to Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst to study at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) and also gain teaching experiences as a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Webster University and the University of Melbourne.
Patrícia ANZINI (seminar paper)
The Grand Conviviality: Ana de Castro Osório and the Luso-Brazilian Destiny.
In 1923, the Portuguese writer, pedagogue, and feminist activist Ana de Castro Osório, travelled throughout Brazil to deliver a series of lectures, published in Lisbon in 1924 as The Grand Alliance. This paper explores how her eponymous São Paulo lecture articulated and enacted modes of conviviality as she promoted her titular vision of a grand alliance between Portugal and its former colony. She emphasized the two nations’ ‘mutual worth, dignity, and essential similarity’ – in Gilroy’s words – to advocate strengthening Luso-Brazilian cultural ties at a time when many Brazilian writers and artists were engaged in a defiant cultural nationalism. However, she rooted this sense of ‘essential similarity’ in the ‘grand’ racial heritage of the Portuguese and their Brazilian ‘children’, and prophesied their shared cultural supremacy. My paper also addresses this potential dark side of similarity as a basis for conviviality.
Patrícia Anzini holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University (U.S.) and an MA in Literary Studies from Universidade Estadual Paulista (Brazil). Her research and teaching focus on Lusophone cultures of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries with an emphasis on Brazil, as well as the comparative literature of the hemispheric Americas; poetry and poetics; theory and practice of translation; transnational studies; Brazuca literature; and Walt Whitman. Patrícia also has a longstanding record of teaching ESL, EFL, and Portuguese language classes.
Understanding aurality as transcultural literacy
In a world where we are bombarded with anthropogenic noise, this presentation focuses on practice-led research that uses birdsong to cultivate ‘arts of attentiveness’ (van Dooren, Kirksey, Münster 2016). Teaching humans to re-learn how to listen, using sound as a way of knowing, follows Steven Feld’s description of ‘sounding and listening as knowing-in-action’ (2017). Living in the world sonically and musically can teach us a lot about ‘interspecies cosmopolitanism’ (Mendieta 2012). Examples of creative practice will demonstrate how approaching music through birdsong (and other nature sounds) generates a convivial social practice.
Attention to listening facilitates dialogue and partnership across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Listening to nature in ‘silence’ recognises aurality as a universal compositional and performance tool, and ultimately as a form of transcultural literacy. I will propose ideas for developing new ways of understanding, appreciating, notating, describing and memorising birdsong for use in music education and composition. This creative use of birdsong will demonstrate how a focus on listening can generate conviviality, stimulate communication between communities and cultures, and promote inclusivity.
Examining processes of translation and transformation will address questions such as: What role does language play in memory, creativity, communication and collaboration? What forms of language translate sound into art (whether visual or aural)? How does interspecies cosmopolitanism bring aurality into literacy?
Amanda Bayley is Professor of Music at Bath Spa University, where she leads an interdisciplinary research group on Intercultural Communication through Practice. Her publications include Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2010) for which she received the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society in 2011. Her research focuses on composer-performer collaborations, rehearsal analysis and creative processes across repertoires and in intercultural contexts including a chapter on ‘Developing Dialogues in Intercultural Music-making’ in the Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research (2016). She is humanities editor for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies and Co-Investigator on two ERC-funded projects.
Fernando BELEZA (seminar paper)
Postcolonial Disquiet: World Literature and Cosmopolitan Conviviality in Fernando Pessoa
This paper examines Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (1928-34) through the lens of Paul Gilroy’s concept of cosmopolitan conviviality and Pheng Cheah’s scholarship on world literature. It argues that Pessoa’s work proposes a postcolonial model of cosmopolitan conviviality, in which the ethicopolitical dimension of world literature plays a fundamental role. More precisely, by deploying the normative world-making dimension of world literature (Cheah), Pessoa imagines in The Book of Disquiet a decentred world-system, where the bookkeeper-writer (Bernardo Soares) joins commercial exchange and cultural/spiritual intercourse, opening new ways, from his office in the periphery of Europe, for rethinking planetary conviviality in a postcolonial, cosmopolitan context. Moreover, it also argues for the relevance of Pessoa’s rather neglected anticolonial sensibility and postcolonial imagination, as they emerge in The Book of Disquiet, for contemporary Lusophone postcolonial studies.
Fernando Beleza is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Newcastle University. He holds a BA from the University of Coimbra, an MA from the University of Porto, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He is the coeditor of the volume of essays Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a Cosmopolitan Modernist, and the author of articles and book chapters on: Lusophone modernism(s); cosmopolitanism, gender, and sexual politics in modern and contemporary Lusophone literatures; Lusophone postcolonial studies; race, gender, and modernity in the Portuguese-speaking world; Lusophone cinemas and the environment. He is also an associate researcher in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Porto and a member of the research project Estranhar Pessoa, based at the New University of Lisbon.
The Interrupted Festive Scene in 19th-Century Opera: Traces of a Post-Traumatic Stress-Syndrome induced by the French Revolution
Pertaining to the culture of conviviality, my paper will discuss a specific dramaturgy in 19th-century French and Italian opera that habitually occurred in politicized works where a festive celebration is depicted on stage in sensual, excessively luxurious detail, both in the music setting and in the staging, but then the festive scene ends badly, with a catastrophic political event interrupting the feast, destroying the characters’ existence, and concluding the opera tragically. This dramaturgy of contrasts has its provenance in the aesthetics of French 19th-century romantic drama (specifically by Victor Hugo), but also contains elements from ancient Greek tragedy’s notion of hubris and nemesis, with the hybridization of an underlying moralizing intention of censorship by having tragedy hit when the characters start to enjoy themselves too much on stage.
In my book The Politicization of Opera in the 19th Century I discussed the reception of the trauma of the French Revolution as a cultural phenomenon that shaped two generations of European citizens. An acculturation of this traumatic historical event took place already during the French Revolution on the stage of the Paris Opéra and had a continuous occurrence in the next genre of French historical opera, known as grand opéra. This artistic acculturation of recent collective trauma is very similar to the reception of the trauma of WWII and of the Vietnam war in the medium of cinematography in the 20th century in America. Analysing these phenomena, specifically what happens to art in situations of political conflict, underlies the importance of historicity and the translatability of human experience, especially of traumatic experience of war, through different historical periods.
The discussed works will include Mozart’s Don Giovanni (where ‘Viva la libertà’’ is mainly used in the sense of libertinage), Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Le Prophète, and Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes.
Maria Birbili studied French literature at the Sorbonne, musicology and theatre studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since her PhD (The Politicization of Opera in the 19th Century, Peter Lang, 2014) she has been a Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Italy, a chercheur associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago, and an editor in the critical edition projects for Rossini, Verdi (UofChicago), and Meyerbeer (Schloß Thurnau). She is currently completing her Habilitation in Germany with a second book on Rossini. Her publications are predominantly on French and Italian opera and literature of the 19th and 18th century.
Beatrice BLANCHET (seminar paper)
War in Translation and Conviviality: Local Interpreters and Narratives of Belonging during the British Military Interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (2001-2014)
This paper investigates the discourses on intercultural cohabitation and interaction during the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, through the analysis of British postcolonial practices and representations associated with local interpreters.
Waged in the context of post 9/11 ‘clash of civilizations’ rhetoric, military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia have followed the contours of British colonial undertaking, and they have reconfigured Britain’s imaginative geographies of the informal Empire (Onley, 2009), an overlooked sphere of influence characterized by interference and acculturation. In the contemporary period, cultural awareness and recognition of linguistic diversity constitute the core principles of counter-insurgency doctrines aiming at ‘winning hearts and minds’ among the local populations. In practice, however, language in translation is weaponized while the native interpreter who subverts linguistic and ideological allegiances remains an insider-outsider as well as an ambiguous figure. Against the backdrop of the attempted westernization of Iraq and Afghanistan’s political order, the ‘cultural mixing and hybridity of war’ (Barkawi, 2006) are undermined by the euphemization of the cultural context of translation. The orientalization of local interpreters exemplifies Britain’s ‘post-imperial melancholia’ (Gilroy, 2004) characterized by highly selective accounts of the past and by the oblivion of former solidarities during the imperial era and the Cold War. Contemporary narratives of identity and place are indeed often predicated upon the assumption of distinctive spheres of belonging (home and away) respectively associated with ‘civilization’ and undomesticated otherness. Following the withdrawal of coalition troops, local interpreters have made the headlines, leaving their cloak of invisibility (Venuti, 1995) to enter the narratives of Britishness. Discussions about political asylum reveal that the recognition of a convivial British society linked to cosmopolitism and mobility often involves ethical representations of ‘deserving’ migrants, heroes-victims of post-imperial wars, qualified for admission to Britain following negotiations of the symbolic boundaries of belonging.
Dr Béatrice Blanchet currently teaches translation and geopolitics at UCLy (Lyon Catholic University, France). She graduated from Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence and completed her PhD on French and British intellectuals at Oxford University (Bourse d’Excellence Lavoisier, French Foreign Office). Dr Béatrice Blanchet has published in leading journals including Modern and Contemporary France and the Journal of European Studies. She has recently participated in international conferences, giving talks on memories of wars and representations of postcolonial boundaries in contemporary Britain. Her early interest in comparative intellectual history has expanded to embrace questions of memories explored through the prism of geographies of belonging.
Marie-Christine BOUCHER (seminar paper)
Translated culture(s) in Nellja Veremej’s Berlin liegt im Osten
Translation has been increasingly present in literary and cultural studies. This concept helps describe ‘hybrid’ phenomena, as it avoids some of the pitfalls and main issues regarding the concept of hybridity. Cultural contact, be it as a result of migration or any other phenomenon, takes place at a specific time, in a specific historical context, in a specific place and space. Translation therefore becomes a useful conceptual tool that allows us to focus on the dialogue and movement between two cultural realms, without needing to conceive cultures as fixed, immutable entities. By focussing on communication and negotiation processes between addresser and addressee, translation avoids universalism and potential essentialising tendencies of multiculturalism. While the concept of hybridity can lead to analyses that lack proper contextualization, ‘a translational view suggests paying more attention to micro-theoretical approaches, and proposes focusing on small-scale units’ (Bachmann-Medick 2018), thereby allowing a contextualizing yet non-deterministic approach to the results of cultural contact.
In Born Translated (2015), Rebecca Walkowitz defines ‘reading in translation’ as a perspective that would observe all texts as translations, i.e. including texts that have not been translated, or texts that do not contain visible traces of foreign languages. Having this in mind, we argue that the transnational novels of migrant authors are examples of conviviality in practice, and should be read as ‘translations with no originals’ (Apter 2006), in which the authors translate cultural references from a source to a target frame of reference – in this specific case, the contemporary German-speaking context. Employing a set of conceptual tools adapted from translation theory, this paper proposes a look at the translation strategies that are used to negotiate questions of space, time, language and gender in Nellja Veremej’s novel Berlin liegt im Osten.
Marie-Christine Boucher holds her BA and MA in German studies from the Université de Montréal. She is now a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, where she is a member of the IPP ‘Literary and Cultural Studies’. Her current research interests revolve around transcultural and transnational German literature, the applications of translation theory in comparative literature and digital literary studies.
Heather BRADSHAW-MARTIN (special interest group workshop)
If you want to be convivial with those in your culture and others, we might say you need to be able to read both your own culture and those of others. Reading technology is part of reading a technological culture. So technological literacy becomes a part of cultural literacy.
Cristina Marras has examined how art, including fiction, may perform a heuristic service for us by modelling the experience of having human emotions and living in human societies, as well as pleasing and refreshing us with beauty. In our Modelling SIG workshop we will use an exercise of Cristina’s based on a famous piece of fiction which playfully combines many of these elements to explore how the reductionism of models – the selection of only specific parts of reality – is purposeful.
Following the use of this exercise at last year’s CLE conference we will draw attention more explicitly to the needs of each of the roles in the roleplay and try to see whether we can improve the usefulness of the models we create by making them more abstract, or more specific, in some way.
By moving from the re-presentational aspects of concrete models further towards purposeful reductionist abstraction we move from the more artistic side of modelling towards the technological, showing us the same phenomenon from different angles. Translating between different modelling media and re-conceptualizing reality in different conceptual vocabularies are foundational technological skills, so in this activity we exercise both our literary literacy and our technological literacy – and, hopefully, in a very convivial spirit.
Heather Bradshaw-Martin is currently a certification engineer at Perkins engines following 5 years as a software engineer at JLR. Her bioethics PhD is from the University of Bristol and she studied PPE at University of Oxford. She is interested in how societies use the technologies available to them and how this in turn shapes their culture. She has published in Nature (Bradshaw 2008), the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (Bradshaw and ter Meulen 2010), the International Journal of Disability, Community & Rehabilitation (Bradshaw 2009) and various books including (ter Meulen, Mohamed and Hall, 2017). Within the CLE Core Group she is particularly interested in the prototyping process.
Małgorzata BUDZOWSKA (seminar paper)
Artistic resistance against political necrophilia
The paper will focus on the theatre production of Antigone by Marcin Liber (The New Theatre in Lodz, Poland, 2013). The main issue considered in the performance and analysed in the paper concerns the exploitation of the dead in the great political narratives of the present day. The director presents a twofold stage reading of the ancient myth. One relates to the meaningful core of the myth oscillating within the framework of political abuse of dead heroes. In this context the figure of Antigone is visualized within the picture of Todd Heisler’s photos of the series Final Salute (2006 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography) portraying the despair of the fallen Marines’ families. Furthermore, on stage, the character of Ismene is drawn upon to ponder a question of survivor guilt – this issue is contemplated in the background of the genocide of Auschwitz (in relation to the art movie 80064 by Artur Żmijewski). The paper will try to scrutinize the network of relationships built by the director between the fallen and surviving victims of the war and its exploitation by the politics. Beyond the mythical and stage plot, the director offers a metatheatrical meditation on the symbol of Antigone, letting the character beg the audience for a peaceful death and to ‘stop raping her corpse’ by the constant necrophiliac abusing of symbols. This question will be explored at the more universal level of post-memory work, individual and collective, that is overused by politicians. In such a framework, with the support of the theatrical work, the paper offers a re-reading of the ancient myth through the lens of present-day concerns about the political management of memory from the Holocaust to contemporary Middle East military operations.
Dr Małgorzata Budzowska has a PhD in Classics and an MA in Theatre and Drama Theory. She is Assistant Professor at University of Lodz (Poland) and the author of two books: Phaedra. Ethics of Emotions in Euripides, Seneca, and Racine (2012), Sceniczne metamorfozy mitu, Teatr polski XXI wieku w perspektywie kulturowej [Stage Metamorphoses of Myth. Polish Theatre of Twentieth First Century from a Cultural Perspective] (2018); she is also coeditor of three books and author and co-author of many articles and chapters on ancient and contemporary theatre and drama.
Łukasz BUKOWIECKI (seminar paper)
Things of Warsaw, things of the museum: between negative heritage, postcolonial melancholia and hopes for a convivial culture
What usually connects museums with postcolonial reflection is the question of who should be the owner of museum objects which were gained (bought, found, stolen) in colonies in the past and are still exhibited and ‘narrated’ by institutions governed by former colonizers. Postcolonial theories have been recently applied to the experience of Central and Eastern Europe, but the history of Polish museums as seen from this perspective has not been discussed yet.
The paper will focus on the case study of the Museum of Warsaw, which has developed the idea of The Things of Warsaw as a theme of its new core exhibition (opened in 2017-2018) and a way of thinking about its huge collection. The old-fashioned, single, linear, chronological museum narrative was replaced by a multi-layered and multi-threaded representation of the city’s past through the museum objects divided into 21 thematic rooms.
Although it was not directly motivated by any postcolonial intentions, the museum is engaging with the colonial past, as the Things allow visitors to perceive local history and identity from many different perspectives, including the de-/post-/colonial one. What values and beliefs do the Things promote, ignore or dispute? Are they connected with negative heritage, do they support any forms of postcolonial melancholia, or do they create a context for developing multicultural conviviality in contemporary Warsaw?
The peculiar obsession with things, if read carefully, may reveal, however, more than the museum means it to, namely the colonial assumptions behind museum work, such as the exclusion of the voices of any former users of the Things and a conviction that museums are the best and ‘final’ places for cultural artifacts. In the paper a postcolonial approach will be applied, therefore, not only to the representation of the city staged by the museum, but also to the museum practices behind the scenes.
Łukasz Bukowiecki holds a PhD in cultural studies from the University of Warsaw, Poland. Since April 2018 he has been a research assistant at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. He supports the work package on City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts within the frames of the European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities (ECHOES) project (Horizon 2020). His academic interests focus around issues of social construction of heritage, cultural history of museums and urban memory. In 2015 he published a monograph devoted to the cultural history and social function of open-air museums in Sweden and Poland.
Fortunata CALABRO (seminar paper)
The Riace Model and its Neighbours: Hospitality, Solidarity, Diversity and Conviviality
Riace is a tiny village in the south of Italy whose mayor, Domenico Lucano, opened its doors to migrants back in 1998 when a boat of Kurdish refugees reached the coast of the village.
From the moment the Kurdish boat arrived, the village was repopulated after decades of mass emigration that had turned it into a veritable ghost town. Thanks to the policies Lucano implemented, the village has returned to life, and Riace’s renowned model was born. The houses that were in a neglected state were recovered and today they have become the homes of migrants who have also been offered job training opportunities. In short, Riace has succeeded in transforming the migratory phenomenon into a resource for the country, into a revival opportunity. Instead of framing the issue of migration as a problem, the Riace model reverses such a perspective and frames it instead as an opportunity for the community.
Cited as an excellent example, the Riace model is one of integration for it focuses on immigrants not as foreign enemies but as welcome guests. Migrants participate in combatting depopulation and help safeguard craft activities and traditional metiers otherwise destined to become extinct.
But Riace is not alone; there are other cities in the same region — Calabria — one of the poorest in Europe, that are working with displaced cultures, with migration and diversity, and integrating them instead of rejecting them. Indeed, Camini and Gioiosa Ionica, two villages not far from Riace, inspired by the work of Lucano have implemented their own model of hospitality, solidarity, and conviviality becoming other two realities to be followed and studied.
This paper will focus on the explanation of these three models (and the sadly legal problem faced by Lucano) of representation and the ethics of conviviality, hospitality, and cosmopolitanism and it will try to explore the question: Are the models exportable? And if so, how? The presentation will include interviews with mayors of the three communities.
Fortunata Calabro is an independent curator, activist and art producer whose curatorial projects address social and political issues. Her research focuses on the interrelation between contemporary socially engaged art practices in Latin American and the Arab Countries. She has served as Associate Curator of La Bienal del Fin del Mundo (Argentina and Chile) and Exhibition Manager at La Bienal de Las Fronteras (Mexico), among others. As Director of Exhibitions and Operations, Fortunata oversees international art fairs such as Pinta (The Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Show) (London / New York), Art Marbella (Spain), and CROSSROADS (London). Currently she serves as editorial board member for Artheorica Magazine (Mexico & US). She frequently participates in various conferences and has published several papers in online and printed publications.
Madeleine Campbell (conference organiser)
Madeleine Campbell is a writer, researcher and translator who teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Her Jetties project has staged Algerian poet Mohammed Dib’s writing through site-specific workshops in which artists and participants ‘translate’ his poetics through sound, gesture, movement and sculpture. Madeleine’s translations of French/Occitan intermedial artist and poet Aurélia Lassaque have appeared on the Poetry International Festival website (Rotterdam 2018). Madeleine is secretary of the Cultural Literacy in Europe forum (CLE) and co-leader of its special interest group on Intersemiotic Translation. She recently published Translating Across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (with Ricarda Vidal, 2019).
Robert Crawshaw (seminar paper)
Rancière’s Re-partage and the symbolic translation of shared experience
Jacques Rancière’s extended essay Le Partage du Sensible (2000) raises the deliberately provocative question of the way in which culture mediates collective feeling in society. As a former Marxist and Hegelian, he explores the dialectic between ‘aestheticism’ (l’esthétique), broadly identified with the institutional structures which enable high culture to be transmitted from one generation to the next in neo-bourgeois society and what he terms ‘the mimetic’ (le mimétisme). The mimetic he associates with craft: the reflexive act of ‘doing’ or ‘making’ together. In both cases, he is seeking to define the manner in which the sentient impulse is translated through participation into a social catalyst. As deployed by Rancière, the word partage has two distinct but overlapping meanings: first that of sharing a common feeling, either as participant or observer, and second that of underlining the fact that different groups of people experience culture in different ways; as a function of politics their experience is partagé (in the sense of being shared out or divided). Rancière argues for a new form of sharing: (what he refers to as re-partage) in which ‘doing’ (le faire), ‘being’ (l’être), ‘seeing’ (le voir) and ‘saying’ (le dire) are combined in collective action. For this redefinition of shared sentient understanding (le sensible) to have social repercussions, the act of living through ‘doing together’ (con-viviality) has to be translated into symbolic form through art, implying a raising to artefactual consciousness of a collectively experienced event or series of events, what Rancière, following Merleau-Ponty, refers to as ‘dédoublement’. My paper will seek to illustrate what this means in practice and how it currently informs research methodology.
Robert Crawshaw is currently a consultant for The Missenden Centre, an independent unit based at Missenden Abbey, Buckinghamshire which advises UK Universities on the design and funding of prospective research projects. Formerly Head of Languages and Cultures at Lancaster University and co-ordinator of the Annual Research Programme for Lancaster’s Institute of Advanced Study, he was an advisor to the European Commission (1994-5) and a Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz (2011). Since the mid-1980s, he has been principal or co-investigator on projects funded by the EU and the UK Research Councils related to management education, language learning, urban culture, comparative literature and academic exchange.
Robert Crawshaw (special interest group workshop)
Cultural Literacy and Social Futures in Practice
with Amanda Bayley
The objective of the proposed workshop is to identify the issues to be addressed when devising a research project into Cultural Literacy, where CL is understood as an historical or contemporary arts-related initiative aimed at benefiting the future development of a given social group. Such issues may include the project’s research questions, the methodologies to be adopted, and its intended outputs and outcomes: the kind of information demanded by most applications for funding to external agencies, public or private.
The workshop will consist of four phases: presentation, group discussion, projected feedback/critique, plenary debate. The two facilitators will each briefly present the outline of an existing CL-related project/case study which is ‘ongoing’, has its own on-line information and benefits from public sources of funding. The two cases proposed are (a) The Narva Art Residency and (b) The Bathscape Project – both accessible on the web.
Participants will be divided into sub-groups affording even treatment of each project. Each sub-group will be tasked with conducting a research audit/evaluation of one of the projects according to criteria which members of the sub-group will have identified themselves. The sub-groups will present in turn a critical analysis of each of the two projects in turn, raising questions as to their objectives, design, outcomes etc. as well as their relationship with the concept of CL as defined by the CLE.
It is hoped that the analyses will raise generic questions concerning the design and implementation of research into the ethics and effectiveness of public initiatives designed to develop Cultural Literacy.
Contemporary juvenile literature giving voice to today’s silenced youth
My communication will focus on the role that contemporary juvenile literature is acquiring nowadays as a way of giving voice to many young people who run the risk of being silenced by contexts of ignorance, misery, hatred, violence, discrimination in today’s societies. For this purpose, I have chosen some ‘modern adolescent novels’ that share a striking feature: their autobiographical character.
In fact, some adolescent novels have lately appeared in the book market, in which the young characters relate the traumatic experiences they have gone through in the real worlds where they came from and how these experiences have determined their lives. I am referring to narratives such as I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, the well-known Pakistani girl; Never Fall Down, in which the American writer Patricia McCormick gives voice to Arn-Chorn Pond, a young Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime; Afghanistan. München. Ich. Meine Flucht in ein besseres Leben, by Hassan Ali Djan, who narrates his escape from Afghanistan, his initial difficulties in integrating into German society and how he managed to overcome them; or Un roi clandestin, in which the writer, Sophie Le Callennec, lends her voice to the little Fahim Mohammad, to tell us the story of his escape from Bangladesh and his first years of illegal life in France.
The contact with these and other books led me to think of their interest as objects of analysis and investigative reflection by the Humanities in general and the Literary and Translation Studies in particular, as a way of opening themselves to the tragic realities that are affecting millions of children’s and young people’s lives all over the world.
Maria Amélia Cruz holds a PhD in Culture Studies from the Faculty of Human Sciences, Catholic University of Portugal. She took her first degree in English and German Philology and her MA in German Studies at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. She has taught English and German in Secondary Education and participated in several pedagogical projects at the IAVE (Institute for Educational Assessment of the Ministry of Education). She has worked in technical and literary translation (German – Portuguese) and is a member of CECC – Research Centre for Communication and Culture, in the research line ’Cognition and Translatability’.
Modesta di PAOLA (seminar paper)
Cosmopolitics and Hospitality in visual art
By cosmopolitics I refer to critical theories whose principles achieve a hospitable and responsible behaviour towards the world in its totality, social and natural. Understanding that the creation of any political horizon is based on the birth of sustainable relationships with otherness, these theoretical interventions have opened up an interesting debate that has seen the outlining of the crucial difference between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics. This difference lies in the fact that humanity is no longer the centre of the cosmos, but rather part of life itself in its most absolute vitalist configurations, in its cycles and readjustments, migrations, the movement and matter that are transformed by reconnecting to the ‘common’ space of the Earth. In fact, ‘cosmopolitics’ does not have to refer to a transcendental ideal but rather to the material and real condition of planetary interdependencies. Nowadays, cosmopolitics is more and more connected to the philosophical concept of ‘becoming-world’ (Braidotti, 2013), which develops this idea in the context of plural and ecological societies. Within the international debate about the human rights of having free access in the ‘world territory’ (Kant, 1789), today there is a drive for a strong ethical and legal posture designed to protect the right of nature to a hospitable coexistence with the human being. In accordance with holistic thinking, in violating a person’s individual rights one also violates the rights of nature itself, for which reason nature must be defined as a legal entity (Biemann; Tavares, 2014). It is here that art reveals a specific interest in the ethical and political dialogue that is established between individuals and social groups, in many cases denouncing the utopia of the modern project of establishing universally a pacific solution between human beings and non-human life forms.
Modesta Di Paola holds a European PhD in ‘Art History, Theory and Criticism’ from the University of Barcelona (Spain, 2015) and another PhD in European Cultural Studies Internationally from the University of Palermo (Italy, 2016). She was a visiting scholar in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Boston) and awarded a Fellowship by the Mellow Foundation to participate in the Seminar ‘The Problem of Translation’ in the Department of Comparative Literature of the New York University (NYU). She is the author of L’arte che traduce. La traduzione visuale nell’opera di Antoni Muntads (Mimesis, 2017) and editor of Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics. Ethics and Aesthetics in contemporary art (University of Barcelona Press, 2018). She has also published many articles focused on visual translation and hospitality, such as ‘Epistemología de la traducción en las artes visuales’ (Boletín de Arte, n. 18, 2018); ‘Re-belle et infidèle. El feminismo canadiense y sus reflejos en las narrativas artísticas del in-betweenness: Mona Hatoum, Chantal Akerman y Ghada Amer’ (Anales de Historia del Arte, 2018); ‘Art, Éthique et Hospitalité dans les Arts Visuels’ (Nous Somme Ici, MuCEM, 2017); ‘Comunidades de un mundo común: hospitalidad y cosmopolítica’ (El otro soy yo. Migraciones políticas y poética. Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, 2018).
Writing alone, reading together: the proleptic gesture of Roland Barthes’s Journal de deuil (2009) and Soirées de Paris (1989)
This paper will explore the kind of conviviality that is enabled through the writing and reading of literary texts; more specifically, the community of readers that might be established around two of French theorist Roland Barthes’s late, posthumously published works, both written in the form of a journal intime. In consideration of recent, slightly bathetic representations of Barthes in both popular fiction (Laurent Binet’s infamous 2015 crime thriller La Septième Fonction du langage) and academic publications (Tiphaine Samouyault’s Roland Barthes, 2015; and Neil Badmington’s The Afterlives of Roland Barthes, 2016), it will explore the feeling of loneliness in the last years of Barthes’s life and the way it manifests in his late writing.
These two texts are both tinged by Barthes’s sadness in the aftermath of his mother’s death in April 1977 and his subsequent solitude; he had lived with his mother his whole life until that moment. I will therefore consider how these texts mediate his sense of loneliness, offering it up to his future readers to help them in turn to feel a little less alone in their own grief or solitude, and how this offer relates to the Barthesian principles of délicatesse and the non-vouloir-saisir. These late texts are thus seen to establish a specific kind of conviviality where readers can commune around experiences that we usually consider to be private: grief and loneliness, but also the small moments of comfort that arise in the course of a day. My argument therefore bears parallels to Darian Leader’s claim that we need public frameworks to facilitate private mourning (Leader, The New Back, 2008: 87); but I will also go beyond Leader’s consideration of grief to ask wider questions about how reading can instigate a specific kind of communion, affirming the sense that we are feeling these things together, diachronically, with Barthes and with other readers of his texts.
Sophie Eager is a second-year AHRC-funded PhD student in the department of French at King’s College London, working under the supervision of Patrick ffrench. Her research concerns questions of solitude and togetherness in the work of Roland Barthes, drawing parallels to Anglo-American thinkers like Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, and links to affect theory and cognitive literary studies. Beyond her PhD work, she is interested in wider questions of the gut and eating as points of communion, and recently co-organised the London Postgraduate French Conference ‘Tummy Trouble’ on the theme of the gut in French and Francophone literature and culture.
Sophia EMMANOUILIDOU (seminar paper)
The Conviviality of the Borderlands: Spaces of In-Betweenness and Self-Identity in Chicana/o Writings
Chicana/o literature has been largely discussed through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands metaphor, a metaphor that pertains to the historically turbulent zone between Mexico and the USA. The borderline between the two countries is primarily a geographical demarcation, one that separates two different, national territories, but it is also a mystifying locale for the realization of cultural interaction, linguistic intermingling and ethno-racial contact. And since the borderlands comprise the proximate, spatial expanse north and south of the border, this space is inherently defined by the paradoxical combination of two distinct notions: severance and fusion. Because of the constant crossing of the line that separates the two countries, the borderlands bring about and sustain the possibilities of hybridity, liminality and ultimately the promises of cultural renewal or even transnational connectivity. This paper proposes that the Chicana/o literary canon puts forward a plethora of self-identity quandaries that arise in the interstices between antipodal and yet reciprocal expressions of consciousness. A borderland is a geographical expansion defined by mobility and heterogeneity, and so it becomes a space that sanctions the exchange of goods and ideas beyond the confines and restrictions of national identity. Finally, this paper proposes that the writings by the Chicana/o thinkers Mario Suárez, Tomás Atencio and Cherríe Moraga are excellent case studies for the discussion of the mutation of self-identity, the conviviality of culture and the creation of spatio-temporal horizons that transcend marked boundaries of being-in-the-world.
Dr. Sophia Emmanouilidou received her PhD from the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, with distinction, in 2003, on a full scholarship from the Foundation of National Scholarships in Greece (IKY). She was a Fulbright grantee at the University of Texas, Austin. She has published several articles on Chicana/o literature and identity-focused theories. Her interests include border cultures, social studies, space theory and ecocriticism. She has lectured at the University of the Aegean, Department of Social Anthropology and History; and the University of the Peloponnese, Department of History and Culture, and the TEI of the Ionian Islands, Department of Environment Technologists. She is presently affiliated with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of American Literature.
Maria Teresa FERREIRA (seminar paper)
Near ruins; [dis]close readings. On Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992)
We think the ruin to be part of a whole filled with holes, but the ruin is a whole filled with wholes. Sometimes, the ruin as a whole has a new unity.
Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins, p. 156
Drawing on narrating (a) community in a world trapped in the chaos of war, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) cartographs an inner quest, in which the boundaries of self and other are forced to shift and reconfigure the sense of place and conviviality.
Four outcasts gather in the chiaroscuro of a ruined nunnery, in the hills north of Florence, and make it their provisional home. Though the building seems to have lost its former purpose, the ancient structure still performs its main activity: it provides sanctuary to traumatized bodies, all [dis]assembled by traumatic memories. Thus, the apparent incongruity (in the sense of inaptness and inconsistency) that moulds life in the Villa San Girolamo signals the characters’ need for individual atonement and collective healing.
Since there is hardly a world around them, they are forced back on themselves. By the same token, as in several of Michael Ondaatje’s novels, a certain type of architecture – the bombed-out villa in this case – shelters an unexpected group of people that have to learn how to read the cultural signs of/in each other. As stated by Robert Ginsberg, ‘[t]he ruin’s integrity extends in new fashion to include its site and perhaps its culture’ (2004:156).
Focusing on the suggested topic ‘Reading through textuality, fictionality, rhetoricity and/or historicity’, this paper aims to present how the main characters of Ondaatje’s novel reinvents a place to dwell, a language to communicate, a way of redemption. Cultural literacy, intersemiotic translation and the symbolics of place are amongst the theoretical concepts used to describe this iconographic space.
Maria Teresa Ferreira is a high-school teacher in the Foreign Languages Department, at Lyceu Camões in Lisbon. She is also a member of the Research Center for Communication and Culture (CECC), FCH-UCP. She majored in ‘Modern Languages and Literatures’ at FCSH, Lisbon, and has a masters degree in ‘Translation Studies and Compared Cultures’ at FCH-UCP. As a doctoral student in Culture Studies (2007-2011) at the Catholic University of Portugal, she collaborated in academic projects, namely ‘Connecting Waters’ and ‘Violent Belongings’, within the research line of investigation at CECC to which she has been committed for several years. She has also been a member of the PhDnet at Justus-Liebig University, in Giessen. She has published articles in the areas of Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and Film and Gender Studies, and has presented papers in national and international conferences, always looking forward to enlarge her horizons in eclectic domains within the scope of Culture Studies & Performance. She is currently reworking on her PhD Thesis entitled ‘Thalassography ─ Performing Water Writing in Ondaatje & Minghella’s The English Patient’.
Mary GALLAGHER (seminar paper)conference organiser)
Translating Conviviality: Imagining Modes of Dwelling and Belonging in Post-Colonial Writing in French
The notions of home, house, homeland, neighbourhood and family are all fundamental elements of the way ideas about belonging and dwelling are inscribed culturally. As Paul Gilroy makes clear by his very frequent use of the epithet ‘habitable’ to qualify the multicultural or democratic order that he envisions in and after his book on post-imperial conviviality, the hopes that one might place in the latter are predicated on finding ways of ‘making habitable’ a given space (quarter, city, country, culture etc.) for those who find themselves sharing it. In the major works that made the reputations of two of French’s most significant post-colonial authors, Marguerite Duras and JMG Le Clézio, the specific circumstances of colonial and post-colonial belonging and dwelling (most crucially perhaps, the theme of the ‘house’) are very present, if not actually dominant. These two imaginaries of living space (‘l’espace habité’ or ‘l’espace de vie’) in Indochina and France and in West Africa and France respectively constitute in effect an acute reflection on the post-colonial relation between ‘being’ and ‘building’ or ‘owning’ (between ‘être’ and ‘avoir’). Moreover, this same reflection is currently being played out very explicitly in the work of more contemporary literary voices in French. It predominates, for example, as a political, ethical and poetic question posed of the Brooklyn-Montreal-Port-au-Prince axis in the work of the Haitian writer, Dany Laferrière, and in terms of an endless cosmopolitan mobility in the writing – between Tunis, Paris and Jerusalem – of Jewish-Tunisian author Colette Fellous.
In all these cases, the concept of conviviality offers a linguistically sensitive and even dissonant key to the stakes of thinking about colonial and post-colonial dwelling/belonging. More specifically, the apparent translation of (post-) colonialism as anti-conviviality in both Duras’s L’Amant and in Le Clézio’s L’Africain confirms the heuristic and more generally generative reach and resonance of this concept in relation to the ways our planet is being, or can be, inhabited now.
Mary Gallagher teaches French (and French migrant writing in particular) in University College Dublin. Her two most recent publications are Paul Morand, Caribbean Winter, Translation and Critical Introduction by Mary Gallagher, Oxford: Signal Books, 2018, which was endorsed by JMG Le Clézio, and ‘Colette Fellous, harraga de l’ordre monolingue : tisser le pays « sans nom » dans Avenue de France’ in Œuvres et critiques XLIII : 1, Colette Fellous, ed. Samia Kassab-Charfi, pp. 55-67, Günther Narr Press, Tübingen, 2018.
Carla GANITO (conference organiser)
Carla Ganito is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Postgraduate Studies and Advanced Training School at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the Catholic University of Portugal (FCH- UCP). She has a PhD in Communication Sciences which tackled the gendering of the mobile phone, an MBA focusing on Information Management and Marketing, and a Management Master’s Degree on Mobile Entertainment in Portugal. Carla Ganito lectures in the fields of digital media, cyberculture, and marketing. She is a researcher at CECC, leading the group on Digital Literacy & Cultural Change, and a MC member of the COST Action IS1404 – Evolution of reading in the age of digitization (E-READ).
Language, Work, and Shared Lives: Juliana Spahr’s poetics of the commons
Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition imagines language as the site in which the sharing of life is negotiated and enabled. This mode of critical theory appears to offer a particular role to poetics, as it operates against the linguistic alienation and instrumentalization through which the life-world is divided and colonized by capital: poetry might defend and depend upon, as French-based Canadian poet Lisa Robertson puts it, language as ‘the commons’. In this paper, I want to explore and challenge this through an account of the work of Juliana Spahr (particularly the writing she produced around Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Commune in 2011-14). Her writing has enormous scope, involving a sensitivity to ecological particularities and a deep analytical account of global political economies, articulating the migration of Brent Geese with the long politics of the ‘oil wars’ and the ticking feed of oil spot prices, the experience of maternity with the ingestion and transmission of toxins and the dailiness of political struggle. Her poetry addresses its ‘song’ at, for example, those cosmopolitan migrant labourers who are ‘pulled from life’s intimacy’ (including the intimate use of their own ‘tongue’) by the demands of global production and circulation.
However, Spahr is energetically sceptical about the role of the poem in the struggle to transform these conditions. She sees its role and its necessity as ‘accompanying’, rather than ‘figuring’ the work of politics. In order to think this relation more precisely and productively, I turn to the critical social theory of Jean-Philippe Deranty, in which the project of recognition is political rather than (or as well as) ethical, and the arena of recognition is labour rather than (or as well as) language. What does it mean to read poetry (also) as an act of work, as we work out how to live together?
Geoff Gilbert is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris. He is the author of Before Modernism Was, and essays on modernism, critical theory and political economy, sexuality, contemporary writing, poetics and prosody, and translation. His poetry has appeared in Lana Turner, the Glasgow Review of Books, Wretched Strangers, and (with Alex Houen) as the collection Hold! West (2016). He is working on a study of contemporary realism, which considers how writing arrives to us across capitalized geographical and linguistic distances, and what this can tell us about the real conditions of our lives, against the formalizations of space and geography offered by contemporary political economy.
Diana GONÇALVES (seminar paper)
Convivial Society, The (Im)Possible Future? The Gifted and the question of being (non-)human
The beginning of the 21st century has been characterized by a growing uneasiness regarding humans and their role as the only species with enough power to both transform life on the planet and endanger it to the point of extinction. Departing from these concerns about the environment, this paper wishes to look at the human ecosystem and try to evaluate the possibility of the creation of an ecologically literate society that promotes conviviality and a sustainable and interconnected existence.
For this purpose, I intend to analyse the science fiction TV series The Gifted (2017) as a challenge to the anthropocentric discourse that focuses on man’s distinguished and dominating condition. Based on Marvel Comics’ X-Men series, this show introduces a society in ebullition, with humans and mutants in opposing ideological poles and in the midst of a fight for civil rights and social justice. The society portrayed in The Gifted is deeply marked by a wide range of conflicts and tensions, many of them derived from the inability to accept and integrate difference, especially when one feels threatened by an Other who may constitute the next step in the evolution of species.
By means of an ecocritical reading of the show and the issues it raises (evolution/regression, humanity/animality, homogeneity/diversity, cooperation/segregation, among others), this paper investigates the (im)possibility of creating a convivial society where fear and anxiety are replaced by constant acts of negotiation that allow for a more inclusive culture and pacific coexistence.
Diana Gonçalves holds a PhD in Culture Studies from Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Justus-Liebig University of Giessen (double degree). She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Human Sciences-UCP and Coordinator of the Master’s Program in Culture Studies of the Lisbon Consortium. She is also a researcher at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC). Diana Gonçalves is the author of 9/11: Culture, Catastrophe and the Critique of Singularity (De Gruyter, 2016). Her main research areas include culture studies, American culture and literature, visual culture, representations of conflict and catastrophe.
Brigitte HIPFL (seminar paper)
Convivial Labour of Films
In this presentation I will make the argument that films can be seen as exemplary for convivial culture in different ways. I use Amanda Wise’s (2016) term ‘convivial labour’ in order to emphasize the fact that ‘the everyday practice of living together takes work’. The (daily) encounters in contact zones require practices of negotiation. I will use Austrian documentary and feature films that address convivial culture and various practices of convivial labour. These films help us to understand ‘how feelings of togetherness … (are) not given but actively produced through social practices, often in the face of change and conflict’ (Amanda Wise and Greg Noble 2016). Films like Little Alien (Nina Kusturica 2009), Tomorrow you will leave (Martin Nguyen 2012), The Migrumpies (Arman T. Riahi 2017), Ciao Chérie (Nina Kusturica 2017) express the feelings, desires and struggles of the protagonists. These films create ‘affective proximities’ (Domitilla Olivieri 2016); that is they bring the protagonists’ lives close to the viewers, provoking affective encounters with the protagonists’ realities and experiences. These films are examples of a ‘structure of feeling’ that can be characterized as a ‘convivialist politics of affect’ (Frank Adloff 2015). The films intervene in the hegemonic regimes of affect that continually (re)produce binaries of us and them by presenting new forms of alliances and practices of conviviality in the sense of ‘rubbing along’.
Brigitte Hipfl is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her research interests are media and gender, subject formations, the affective labour of media, and postcolonial Europe. Currently she is exploring how migration is addressed in Austrian cinema and TV. Among her recent English publications is a book coedited with Kristìn Loftsdottir and Andrea L. Smith, Messy Europe. Crisis, Race and Nation State in a Postcolonial World (Berghahn, 2018).
Christina HORVATH (seminar paper)
Afropolitanism: a ‘fresh product’ to promote elite consumerism or a form of cosmopolitanism from below?
Coined by Taiye Selasi in her 2005 essay ‘Bye bye Babar’, the concept of ‘Afropolitan’ translates the transnational experience of a new generation of highly educated and mobile Afro-descendants who identify as citizens of the world. Promoting pride in black roots and cultural legacy, Afropolitanism has developed an extroverted, confident self-expression with some elite undertones emphasizing individual goals, social achievements, purchasing power and an aesthetic of coolness. Over the last decade, Afropolitan creativity, high-end design and cultural products have been used by a transnational black elite to renegotiate their identities in new, positive terms. However, with the rise of the Internet and its on-line communities, Afropolitanism has also allowed subaltern groups to engage in discussion accross borders through activities including beauty blogging, digital enterpreneurship, and black political activism. The recent success of the action movie Black Panther, which featured for the first time an all-black cast and narrated the story of a fictive, never colonized, prosperous and technically advanced African country, Wakanda, has shown the emergence and purchasing power of a worldwide black audience looking for empowering ‘fresh cultural products’. An example of this was seen in Brazil, a country with more than 100 million black and brown people, where the movie sparked all-black viewings and organised gatherings in upscale shopping malls typically reserved for Brazil’s white elite – as protests against racial exclusion. This paper will look at a range of Afropolitan cultural products crossing national borders and it will draw on concepts formulated by Beck (2006), Hall & Werbner (2008), Toivanen (2017), Robinson & Cantey (2016) and Linscott (2017), to assess their potential to promote subaltern forms of black cosmopolitanism.
Christina Horvath is Senior Lecturer in French Literature and Politics at the University of Bath. Her research addresses urban representations in literature and film, with emphasis on artistic expressions of advanced marginality such as contemporary French ‘banlieue narratives’ and favela literature in Brazil. She has organised several interdisciplinary conferences and summer schools addressing urban marginality and designed and run creative workshops in urban communities internationally. She has published widely on contemporary French and Francophone literature, banlieues and postcolonial France. Since 2014, she has worked on the conceptualisation of ‘co-creation’ defined as an art-based method to promote social justice in disadvantaged urban areas.
Michèle Bokobza KAHAN (seminar paper)
Guests and Hosts in the novel of emigration during the French Revolution
The events concerning the French aristocracy’s emigration during the French Revolution have been discussed over the years by many historians from different ideological points of view, reflecting either sympathy or hostility toward the émigré. But, whatever the interpretation is, the fact remains that the flight of the French nobles from France to foreign countries produced many literary narratives that not only reflect the historical events, but mostly introduce the reader into poetic spaces of intimacy. Narrating the experiences of emigration and exile, of confrontation with the other and manners of integration into foreign cultures in novels, memoirs, or diaries, leads to the emergence of a personal voice coping with processes of memorization and selection. When the author is a woman, such as Isabelle de Charrière, Mme de Duras, Sophie de Genlis, Eléonore de Boigne, one notices a particular way of handling conflictual situations and formulating critical observations about modes of integration into a new environment – such as the construction of domestic spaces, non-closure of the plot, the centrality of various feminine figures, etc.
One of the topics which is frequently represented in these books (both fictional and autobiographical) is the relationships between the emigrants and their hosts, in England, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland and Italy. Female authors tend to create spaces of conviviality such as salons, dinners and social events. They challenge the question of conviviality not only in order to raise some cultural observations but also as a means of scrutinizing the exchanges and expressing implicitly political statements.
My paper aims to analyse the functions of those representations of conviviality as one of the ways for women who were victims of the collapse of their privileged world to express both personal and collective negotiations with the traumatic experience of emigration in those turbulent times. I first ask about the gender specificity of their writing: how do women write about the experience of escaping, moving and integrating, in general, and how do they tackle the topic of interactions, sometimes conflictual, between different cultures and languages, in particular? And then, how might the reading of this literature be meaningful for the understanding of contemporary social and cultural phenomena concerning emigration, hospitality and integration?
Prof Michèle Bokobza Kahan is Full Professor in French Culture and Literature at Tel-Aviv University, Department of Literature. Her fields of teaching and research are: 1) 18th-century France, literature and culture (libertine novel, theatre, gender studies, philosophers of the Enlightenment, religious and political conflicts; 2) Fiction and reality: theoretical approaches; 3) Testimonial discourses from the 18th to the 21st century. She is the author of Libertinage et Folie dans le roman du 18e siècle (2000), Dulaurens et son œuvre: Un auteur marginal au XVIIIe siècle (2010), Témoigner des miracles au siècle des Lumières: Récits et discours de Saint-Médard (2015).
Patrycja KASZYNSKA (keynote head-to-head)
Dr Patrycja Kaszynska is Research Fellow at the Innovation Insights Hub, University of the Arts London; Research Associate in Culture, King’s College London; and Head of the Art History Faculty at New College of the Humanities. She was previously Project Manager for the Cultural Value Scoping Project – an initiative supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council [AHRC], Paul Hamlyn Foundation and King’s College London, in partnership with Arts Council England; and Project Researcher for the AHRC Cultural Value Project – an influential research programme concerning the value of arts participation and cultural engagement. She has worked in policy research for a number of political organisations and think-tanks and in the higher education sector, and has published on a range of topics including the ways of valuing culture and the connection between aesthetics and politics.
Mustapha KHAROUA (seminar paper)
Cyber Communities: The (Dis)articulation of a Linguistic Hegemony
with Abdelmajid Ridouane
The correlation of the postmodern condition and the various englishes used by the cyber communities safeguards an understanding of how the digital age works towards a massive hegemonization of the English language that threatens to overshadow multilingualism. Conceptualizing these communities’ englishes from this perspective problematizes the mainstream definitions of multilingualism; it seems to position English as an antidote to multilingualism. In the globalist environment which networks us through modern technologies the world seems to be heading towards a neo-multilingualism, wherein ‘multi’ is cultural, while ‘lingual’ is exclusively English.
This could be argued through the correspondence of postmodernist tropes and the linguistic expression used by the cyber communities. The double-faceted social network multi-cultural linguistic performances, which these amorphous communities promote, promulgate the English language through a vulgarization of linguistic performance. This may include the ‘play’ with spelling mistakes, the ‘death’ of grammar, and the multimodal ‘collage’ of icons such as acronyms and emoticons. This trendy collective insouciance encourages non-native speakers to communicate in an ‘english’ they may – in fact – keep using continually, but only limitedly. While this condition seems to disarticulate and disempower English language performance, it actually articulates its hegemony and dominance. We seem to live in an era where the English language, which has become more ‘semiotic’ than ‘expression’, seems to cede its representation of concrete power to the transnational institutional corporate moguls. Considering the staggering statistics of the users of English worldwide, besides the English language’s supremacy in the fields of science, humanities, and technology, it may be argued that the aforementioned correlation may draw attention – at least in cyber space – to an overlooked dialectic between the demise of multilingualism and the rise of newer linguistic hegemonies.
Prof Mustapha Kharoua is a professor at the University Ibn Zohr Agadir, Morocco; he has worked as teacher, member of exam and curriculum development committees for the American Cultural Association in Agadir, Morocco, since 1999. Member of CLAS and LVSD research laboratories specialized in education, culture and technologies. PhD holder at the University of Eastern Finland: his focus was on Postcolonial Trauma Studies. He has 22 years of experience in performance arts. Member of the Reutlingen Drama network. In 2008, finished his MA in Postcolonialism and African American Studies at Ibn Zohr University. Co-founder of the project ‘The Liminals’, which combines education, culture, postcolonial studies and technologies.
Taegŭm in Motion: Music Making in a Cosmopolitan setting
Transcending the traditional concepts of music-making in ensembles, many international projects are gearing up for the exploration of intercultural exchanges beyond the natural boundaries of cultures and art forms, whether ethnically or nationally.
This paper focuses on the cultural literacy of a Korean traditional musician within a cosmopolitan music setting. It will discuss how the performers in intercultural ensembles have to adjust themselves to the change in notation systems in the process of intercultural music-making, and also examine how the flexibility in the intersection of music and movement challenges the boundaries between composition and improvisation.
The exploration is based on the opera ‘Woman at Point Zero’, commissioned by the Shubbak Festival with support from the Royal Opera House and Snape Maltings (Aldeburgh Music). In this project, the intercultural ensemble consists of a Korean taegŭm player, a Japanese sho player, a Turkish ney player, an Armenian duduk and recorder player and an Egyptian/German singer, all providing music but at the same time also taking on roles as (silent) characters or representing various natural elements. Borrowing methodologies from ethnographic research, the paper will reflect the writer’s own personal experience of being part of the opera as a Korean traditional flute player.
Hyelim Kim is currently a research fellow at Bath Spa University. She obtained her PhD in ethnomusicology from SOAS in 2014, where her dissertation was on the performance-as-research of Korean traditional music; this dissertation is being prepared for publication by Routledge in 2019. Hyelim has been engaged to teach at various universities in both England and South Korea, including SOAS, Bath Spa University, Hanyang University and Kyungbuk National University. As well as the traditional music of Korea, Hyelim is also interested in the modernisation of Korean culture, South Korean music, and theories of cultural nationalism and transformation.
As a composer and taegŭm soloist, Hyelim has been performing professionally since 2000 specialising in traditional repertoire and various cross-over genres. Her debut recording entitled Nim: Hyelim Kim Taegŭm Collection, released by Universal Music in 2013, includes traditional pieces together with new works, special commissions and her own composition. She has since released three further recordings (a live recording of a fully improvised recital, a collection of traditional Korean court music and an improvised collaboration with Australian avant-garde jazz musicians). She is also a regular member of the Third Orchestra (Barbican Centre) and the London-based contemporary band Club Inégales.
Cheyne KIRKPATRICK (seminar paper)
Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: Decolonizing Global Citizenship
There has been a significant initiative in higher education to internationalize and diversify campuses and curriculum in order to become more competitive and better prepare students to become global citizens. In the process, growing criticism has arisen of Eurocentric knowledge, racial hierarchies, cultural subordination, and gender inequalities (Grosfoguel, 2011). The movement to decolonize higher education has gained momentum. Decolonization, the dismantling of the underlying and far-reaching cultural forces of colonialist power, is a growing movement (Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin, 2000). Despite the growing awareness and reality that higher education must internationalize and decolonize, there is the undeniable challenge in how this can justly be achieved. How should higher education respond and behave towards the challenges of internationalization, decolonization, cultural awareness, and convivial culture? One response by higher education has been to include curriculum and pedagogy that incorporates more ideological principles of global citizenship. Although a worthy endeavor with good intentions, many of the ideological foundations of global citizenship in higher education include biases and assumptions from western worldviews (Oliveira Andreotti, 2011). This paper will identify and explore cultural diversity through global citizenship and its relationship to initiatives in higher education to decolonize and internationalize research, curriculum, and pedagogy.
Cheyne Kirkpatrick is a faculty teaching assistant professor of English language at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, USA. He has taught international and American students at university level for more than ten years. His interests and areas of research include second-language acquisition, second language writing, English for specific purposes, global citizenship, and international business and business administration. He has presented and lectured in North America, Europe, and Asia. He holds a Master’s Degree in applied linguistics, a graduate certificate in organizational leadership, and is currently an MBA candidate.
Joanna KOSMALSKA (seminar paper)
Polish writers on conviviality in Brexit Britain
Agnieszka Dale, a Polish writer living in London, observes that it has become easier for migrants, at least Poles, to make themselves heard since Brexit. British broadcasters and publishers, who previously rejected all work by foreigners unless it was somehow linked to the Middle East, reach out to them asking for a contribution.
As Brexit opened up some space for the voices of Polish authors, they have used this opportunity to reinvigorate a debate on the relationship between the British and migrants in the UK. In pursuing this theme, they explore, perhaps inevitably, the questions of belonging and national identity. The recent economic migrations have produced a fair share of Polish idealists who support the notion of living in a world devoid of national borders and racial divisions. For some of them, like Agnieszka Dale or Jarek Sępek, Britain was a stunning example of how a fusion of different ethnic groups, cultures and religions could produce a modern, prosperous society. But the Brexit vote showed how the nation that had been at the forefront of progressive movements was divided and it might be more hesitant to identify with these movements than had seemed the case.
One of the interferences drawn from this is that, for a significant number of people, the idea of British national identity remains rooted in the past. What this means for migrants, especially those born outside the UK, is that even if they have fully assimilated into the local culture, attained a high degree of cultural literacy and acquired British citizenship, they may never be perceived as members of the nation. Seen in a wider, European context, the Brexit vote is an acute reminder of how multicultural countries badly need to find some spiritual values and goals that would bind together their inhabitants. A continuing, single, pro-capitalist focus on physical well-being no longer suffices to unite a society. As European countries are inescapably reshaped by migrations, the traditional ideas of how a nation is defined call for a re-examination, an update.
Joanna Kosmalska works as a research-and-teaching fellow at the Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Łódź. She is a translator, author and coordinator of the research project on Polish (E)Migration Literature in Britain and Ireland since 2004, and a member of Talking Transformations project and CLE Special Interest Group: Cultural Literacy and Creative Futures. She has recently edited an issue of Teksty Drugie on migrant literature, published interviews with migrant writers and articles on Polish writing in Britain and Ireland.
Alexandra LOPES (seminar paper & conference organiser)
Girls on books: Experiencing conviviality in translated children’s literature
Those who grew up in the Portugal of the 1950s on to the 1970s were raised on a diet of translations. Even though there was a considerable tradition of children’s literature in Portuguese – many major writers have at one time or another produced poems and/or narratives for the young – certain genres were conspicuously absent. Adventure stories were, for instance, virtually non-existent.
Therefore, publishers relied heavily on translations of foreign works by authors such as Enid Blyton, Erich Kästner, Lieutenant X, Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari. My paper will focus on the controversial British author. Blyton soon became a favourite, having all her major series translated into Portuguese: the Secret Seven, the Famous Five, the Mystery series. For the purposes of this paper, I will discuss her boarding-school narratives, and particularly the book series Malory Towers.
Along with other collections – the Library for Girls and the Library for Boys amongst others – Blyton’s series shaped the imagination of generations of girls at a time when the world was still not global(ized) to the extent it is today. In a Portugal that stood ‘proudly alone’, as the dictatorship’s motto went, these books may have opened up a window to the world, acquainting girls with different peoples, institutions, ways of living.
By acquainting children with diversity and fostering a taste for the foreign, this experience of a world not of ‘one’s own’ – English breakfasts, outdoor sports and boarding schools figuring predominantly as adventures in themselves – produced a community around translation (Venuti, 2000), a sort of imagined cosmopolitan conviviality among young readers.
This paper will discuss the role these translations played in the imagination of their readers, and particularly girls, and how the translations dealt with differentness at a time of uniformity in Portuguese culture. No matter how ‘askew’ and/or ‘familial’ the translations or how conservative the stories, these narratives fostered a kind of cosmopolitan imagination that may have impacted on the worldview of generations of young readers.
Alexandra Lopes teaches Theories of Culture, Translation History and Theories, and Literary Translation at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies. She is currently vice-dean at the School of Human Sciences and Coordinator of the Department for Culture Studies. She has published a number of essays on culture and translation studies in Portuguese and international volumes, as well as a handful of translations of literature (works by Salman Rushdie, William Boyd, Herta Müller and Peter Handke). She coedited The Age of Translation. Early 20th-century Concepts and Debates (2017) and Mediations of Disruption in Post-conflict Cinema (2016). She is the editor of the issue on Translation, Resistance & Cosmpolitanism of Comunicação e Cultura (to be published in early 2019).
Performative Problems
This paper investigates the ‘performative’ and how this concept might be problematic for issues around art and conflict. The performative is investigated in terms of how identities are produced (Butler) but ineffective in creating meanings that seem convivial. The problem can be seen today, in European and global-market contexts of art and culture, in how a positive value is placed on doing, subjectivity, and bodily action… when in fact these same relations can produce pseudo-activity, alienation and abstraction; as Kunst asks, what does ‘performative’ mean today when art and capitalism are so closely related? This key question sets up the aim of this paper: to investigate how the performative is engaged not only in gender theory but in terms of literary and interdisciplinary forms of contemporary art, such as performance art and socially-engaged practice. What is called performance drawing warrants investigation as well, since this discipline complicates the possibility of incorporating notions of ‘point’ and methods of ‘plastic reading’ (Malabou). A plastic reading might be understood as a strategy to think again about what kind of identity is performatively expressed in efforts to draw, write, or inscribe changes of form as ‘plasticity’. The latter parts of this paper investigate conflicts of identity in art that express plasticity from two standpoints: a refusal to act (in terms of cultural imperatives like ‘act now!’ or ’do something creative!’); and how someone can change the form or essence of what they are in identity.
Robert Luzar is an artist, writer, and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Bath School of Art and Design. He holds a PhD by practice from Central Saint Martins. His research is into notions of ‘event’ and ‘trace’, which he interprets through interdisciplinary drawing, live-art and projection technology. His works are exhibited internationally, and have appeared in venues such as: Palazzo Loredan Venice (IT), Torrance Art Museum (USA), DRAWinternational (FR), Katzmann Contemporary (CA), KCCC (LTU), and Talbot Rice Gallery (UK). And his writings are included in books and journals such as Nancy and Visual Culture (Edinburgh 2016), Theatre and Performance Design (Routledge 2017), and Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice (Intellect 2019).
Adriana MARTINS (seminar paper)
Street Art, Urban Experience and Conviviality
For several years, street art had a minor status in the domain of arts, being considered either as non-art or as a marginal creative phenomenon associated with criminal acts of profanation of public and private spaces. In an era marked by the proliferation of visuality in daily life (Mirzoeff, 1999: 3), street art constitutes an interesting field to examine the epistemological value of images and of visual experiences as well as of their mediality and representational power (Bachmann-Medick, 2016: 249).
Starting from Burnham’s premise that street art has transformed urban areas into cultural laboratories, through which public spaces and urban visual aesthetics are questioned (apud Waclawek, 2011: 7), this paper aims at discussing how in a global era, dominated by the proliferation of what Augé (1995) calls ‘non-places’, street art has contributed to transform ‘non-places’ into ‘places’ invested with meaning, allowing those who inhabit or visit the urban space to develop new modes of perception of and interaction with the city. By referring to the work of Banksy, I shall demonstrate how, by challenging the visual narrative of the city, street art (i) transforms liminal urban spaces into places of action, interaction, negotiation and cultural translation; (ii) promotes conviviality; and (iii) assumes an emancipatory potential of agency that impacts the work of social imagination (Appadurai, 2006) and the configuration of individual and collective identities.
Adriana Martins is Assistant Professor of Culture Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon, where she teaches Culture and Globalization, Portuguese Film, Portuguese Culture and Portuguese as a Foreign Language. She is also a Senior Member of the University’s Research Centre for Communication and Culture Studies (CECC). Her main research interests are Culture Studies, Film Studies and Intercultural Communication. Her last book is Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema (coedited with Alexandra Lopes and Mónica Dias, Palgrave, 2016).
Would you experience me? Art as a means of communion
After more than 15 years reflecting on artistic practice, Lev Tolstoy finally finished his polemic treatise What is Art? (1897). Since its publication, the theory of art expounded in this work has been either subsumed under the general name of ‘expression theory’ or rejected for the extreme consequences of its arguments (i.e. the dismissal of almost all of the Western artistic canon).
However, despite the question in its title, What is Art? is notoriously amiss in providing any (objective) definition of art. Its author is more interested in disputing the validity of any ‘science of beauty’, i.e., Aesthetics, in order to put forward a new approach to art. In the author’s words: ‘Art, all art, has in itself the property of uniting people. All art causes those who perceive the feeling conveyed by the artist to unite in soul, first with the artist, and secondly with all who have received the same impression’ (Tolstoy: 120-129).
In the framework of What is Art?, art – intentional communication through feeling and emotions – becomes a means of communion among people. In the broad sense of ‘art’ employed in this work, this ‘affective’ category can accommodate not only works of architecture, poetry, folk tales, drama, music, but also jokes, riddles, rhymes, sermons, processions and church services. It is in the inherent pervasiveness of artistic communication that Tolstoy finds a crucial argument against Plato’s verdict, in his Republic, that the artist is persona non grata in the city.
This paper will focus on the specificity of the process of communicating through art as described in What is Art? and will argue that in its invitation to share a community of feeling, art becomes a project of experienced values, of conviviality. Tolstoy’s description of art, it turns out, is unexpectedly modern.
Ana Matoso is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences and a member of the University’s Research Centre for Communication and Culture (CECC). After graduating with a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures, Portuguese and English (1998), she obtained her MA in Theory of Literature in 2005, and her PhD in 2012 (from the University of Lisbon), with a dissertation on Tolstoy and Wittgenstein. Her main research interest concerns the relations between literature, philosophy and religion. She has translated authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Lethem, Eudora Welty, David Leavitt, George Steiner and Rachel Cusk.
Anna-Louise MILNE (seminar paper)
Hospitality as intangible cultural heritage: what community of ‘practitioners’?
Drawing on the current multilateral project led by the Paris-based Pole for the Exploration of Urban Resources (PEROU) to register ‘acts of hospitality’ as a form of intangible cultural heritage within the UNESCO framework for safeguarding, this paper will explore what it means to conceive of ‘a community of practitioners’ of this heritage and the role of conviviality and cultural representations in self-constitution of that community. The fieldwork context is Paris in the super-diverse environment in La Chapelle where, after decades of post-colonial immigration, ‘mobile people’ en route North from East Africa and the Middle East encounter those who, for varying reasons, make France the way-station or final destination of choice. Converging in this space is, then, a particularly complex range of languages, trajectories and strategies for ‘life-seeking’, as well as a harsh administrative and security context. This presentation will focus on some ways in which the encoding and decoding of hospitality has been put into action in these situations of minimal linguistic interaction and significant social disparity. In so doing it will displace the paradigm of humanitarian action in contexts of crisis, to discuss what sort of generality and translatability the notion of hospitality can afford. It will consider the following questions:
What sort of cultures and memories of conviviality prevail over the development of acts of hospitality in a ‘hostile’ environment? What sort of translational acts enable these cultures to emerge between ‘practitioners’ and recipients? And how does this ‘communauté à venir’ of practitioners record and represent its existence to itself (through writing, on-line and on paper, photography, festivities)?
It will conclude on the challenges of describing this community of practitioners within the framework of the UNESCO convention.
Anna-Louise Milne is Director of Research at the University of London Institute in Paris where she is currently developing the Paris Centre for Migrant Writing and Expression. Her work is located at the intersection between urban sociology and cultural history, with a particular focus on changing practices in public space. Notable publications are a book on Jean Paulhan, an edited collection, May 68. Rethinking France’s Last Revolution (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris (2013) and Contemporary Fiction in French (forthcoming in 2019). Her most recent book entitled 75 was published in 2016 in Gallimard’s Collection Blanche series. It is her first full book in French and an experiment in urban poetics and trans-lingual writing. She lives and writes in the north-east of Paris.
Arianna NOWAKOWSKI (seminar paper)
Teaching Cultural Literacy and Global Citizenship in the Adult Online Learning Environment
This paper will address the unique challenges that inhere in teaching principles of cultural literacy and cosmopolitanism to adult learners in an online environment. Efforts to internationalize online curricula without resorting to Western – even colonial – perspectives will be addressed, as will the necessity of tailoring the online experience to the cultural backgrounds, learning styles, and predispositions of older adult learners. Lastly, the paper will assess the value and challenges of incorporating experiential learning opportunities into online pedagogies and will highlight successful approaches to internationalizing higher education in a virtual realm.
Arianna Nowakowski is the Assistant Director and Teaching Assistant Professor for the Global Community Engagement MA Program at University College, the University of Denver. She received her PhD. in International Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 2012. Her fields of expertise are International Politics and Comparative Politics, although her interests extend beyond these areas to include questions of international gender politics and the negotiation of national and cultural identities. Her research also addresses the impact of culture and colonial legacies in online adult education.
La Question juive in Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe du futur: Sartre’s Existentialist Crisis of the Jew in the Contemporary Moment
It was soon after the Second World War that Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) as a meditation on the return of the deported Jews to France. The book is noteworthy for its interrogation of the personality of the anti-Semite and the position which not only the anti-Semite but society in general places the Jew. Seventy years later, Riad Sattouf re-opened this discussion of the anti- Semite and his victims in his comic book series L’Arabe du futur (2014-2018). Sattouf shifts the center of focus from the French Republic to discuss anti-Semitism in the Syrian Arab Republic under president Hafez al-Assad. In doing so, he suggests Sartre’s point that anti-Semitism makes the Jew, as his young protagonist born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father is made into a Jewish Israeli through the eyes of the young boys of the Syrian village in which he lives. The young fictionalized Riad must confront this hostility towards an identity with which both he and his accusers are little familiar. In the same work, Sattouf makes reference as well to another of Sartre’s texts, Les Mots (1963), in which the philosopher presents a theatricalized portrait of himself in the process of trying to create his own identity. In both cases, the child is gifted and golden-haired but also destined to fall and submit to his own inauthenticity. I will discuss the alignment of Sattouf’s fictionalized self-portrait with Sartre’s in order to analyse the anti-Semitism about which both speak. I will show how Sattouf presents the complex political situation of his youth that resonates with the current contemporary moment as his young protagonist goes through a crisis of identity, rejected from both lands of his parents and given a new identity with which he has no association.
Molly O’Brien is a PhD candidate in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. Before this, she was a lecturer at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) from 2015 to 2016. She received her Master’s in French literature from Florida State University in 2015, during which she was also a lecturer, and she received her Bachelor’s in French Studies from this same university in 2013. Her research interests include 20th- and 21st-century French and Italian literature that treats the Holocaust, World War II, and Jewish identity and is interested in writers such as Patrick Modiano, Alessandro Piperno, Umberto Saba, and Marguerite Duras.
CCC: Currency of Collective Consciousness
Artists and other cultural workers are fragile when acting alone, facing more personal consequences. After every radical and transformative act, heavy aftershocks might resonate for a long time, which might puzzle us. How do we challenge the limits of structural change in a progressive manner today? How could we mediate in those moments and challenge top-down decision-making, repurposing it in real time. How can we learn to act collectively?
Born in 1981 in Diyarbakır, Turkey, Ahmet Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer who lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. He is the initiator of the Initiator of The Silent University, which is an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by refugees, asylum seekers. Working across a variety of media, Öğüt’s institutional solo exhibitions include Bakunin’s Barricade, Kunstverein Dresden, DE (2018), Hotel Résistance, KOW, Berlin (2017), No Protest Lost, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2017), Round-the-clock, ALT Bomonti, Istanbul (2016), Forward!, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2015); Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Apparatuses of Subversion, Horst-Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg (2014); Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina (2013); Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2012); SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul (2011); The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum (2010); Künstlerhaus Bremen (2009); and Kunsthalle Basel (2008). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (2018); the British Art Show 8 (2015-2017); the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015); 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2014); Performa 13, the Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Trickster Makes This World, Nam June Paik Art Center (2010); the New Museum Triennial, New York (2009); and the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008). Ögüt has completed several residency programs, including programs at the Delfina Foundation and Tate Modern (2012); IASPIS, Sweden (2011); and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2007–2008). He has taught at the Dutch Art Institute, Netherlands (2012); the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Finland (2011–2016); and Yildiz Teknik University, Turkey (2004–2006), among others. Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University (2013); the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine (2012); the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs 2011, Netherlands; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft, Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2010). He co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).
Forward escape? The British culture in Polish emigrants’ prose memoirs (1945-1989)
Between 1945 and 1989, Polish literature was developing in two ways: in the country and abroad. In exile, the most popular literary genre was undoubtedly prose memoirs. This paper will refer to one of the most frequent issues in the Polish emigrants’ memoirs – contact with the foreign and outlandish British culture. This topic is a paradox. On the one hand, memoirs were a form of escape from emigré everyday life; on the other, they were often concerned with the initial struggles with this new reality. It was a form of forward escape. Writing in Polish and about Poland, from the past, was a way to close the previous period of the emigrant’s life and because of this it resulted in assimilation into the UK. This paper will present ways of perceiving the British culture as foreign through the prism of the personal experiences of Polish emigrants and ways of perceiving British reality through the prism of patterns known to Poles. I will argue that, in Britain, the authors of memoirs placed the natives in the role of the Other, even though they themselves might be expected to appear in this role. It was a phenomenon that we can call colonialism à rebours. This paper is part of the research carried out on Polish emigrants’ memoirs conducted as part of the author’s doctoral grant.
Jakub Osiński is a PhD student in the Institute of Polish Literature in the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland (supervisor Prof. Wacław Lewandowski). He deals with Polish literature in the twentieth century, above all, emigré literature created in the years 1945-1989. He has published many articles on this subject in important Polish journals. He has also taken part in about 30 conferences. He is principal investigator of the doctoral grant ‘Emigration Memories Prose’ (funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education).
The Convivial Path of Multi-Script Writing
That English is the lingua franca of the digital age is a self-evident truth to which there are two most regularly-voiced responses. One is of resigned despair towards the re-ordering of the global culture around English; and the other is a scrutiny of how English itself is changing as the result of the incorporation of other linguistic communities. This paper explores some alternative scenarios, focusing on the use of digital technology that is preserving and promoting minor languages in the 21st century, and comparing examples from the globalized world of English with multi-script practices in the space of cultural circulation created by the hanzi script in medieval East Asia. By looking at the history of multi-script writing, this paper aims for a recognition of an overlooked mode of conviviality that has existed down the ages and continues into the present. It will reflect on cultural literacy not only as metaphor but as cognitive technology and address some of the current assumptions that go with script, language and translation in relation to the idea of a convivial culture.
Dr Sowon S Park (DPhil, Oxford) held faculty positions in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Ewha University (Seoul) before moving to UC Santa Barbara where she is currently working on cognitive approaches to world literature. She has held visiting appointments at UC San Diego, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren, Berlin, and was the Alice Tong Sze Research Fellow at Cambridge. She has published widely on British modernism, suffrage literature, world literature, Virginia Woolf and neuroliterary criticism. She is former President of the Research Committee of Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association.
Suzana PARREIRA (seminar paper)
Food, Memory and Creativity: how Michelin-starred chefs use memories as cultural creative assets
Memories reveal important aspects of the ways in which food contributes to cultural practices and social relationships, both at home and at the restaurant. Memory is a privileged source for fueling the creative process of chefs and is often used as an asset when designing fine-dining experiences. Commensality and conviviality are a result of the whole process, starting with the chef’s personal and professional experiences but also relying on the public’s own food memories. A meal creates meaning as it enables a collective acknowledgement of food and provides a sense of communal existence. Our food choices imply a ‘world view’ that is both cultural and social, as well as moral — it results from a complex relationship between personal and social identity, convenience issues and a sense of responsibility. This article attempts to describe how the further application of memories, as part of a chef’s creative process, becomes crucial to understanding the symbolic layers of a dish or how the entire menu is designed. Memory is as much a starting-point as a destination as chefs design dishes that call for every individual’s memories to be activated, creating new experiences that trigger childhood or old images, aromas or flavours. In order to explore the field, phenomenology as a research method was applied, to map the creative process of five chefs, all Michelin stars holders. By mapping the creative process of Michelin starred chefs, from the idea’s generation, through implementation to final validation of a dish, the study intends to elucidate the meanings and symbolic role played by memory as a part of creativity in high cuisine.
Suzana Parreira is an Assistant Professor at FBAUL – Fine Arts Faculty, University of Lisbon – where she studied Communication Design and has been teaching different courses in Semiotics, Cultural Studies and Communication Design, since 2002. In 2005 she graduated from ISEG — Lisbon School of Economics and Management – with an MFA in Economic Sociology. As a researcher, she has been working in the fields of creativity, design methods and food studies. Her PhD thesis (2015) combines the design and food fields, exploring the design process and the creative processes of high cuisine chefs.
Manuela PERTEGHELLA (Special Interest Group workshop)
Home on the Move: Intersemiotic Translations of ‘Home’
with Ricarda Vidal
Interlingual and intersemiotic translation, as the interpolation, overlapping, cross-fertilisation of different modes, senses and signs making up ‘meaning’, us to investigate perceptions of ‘home’ from different yet complementary perspectives. In this workshop, we will present our Talking Transformations: Home on the Move (www.talkingtransformations.eu) project and invite participants to explore their own notions of home via intersemiotic translation. In small groups, we will analyse two art films. Each group will then work on an intersemiotic translation back into poetry. We would like to encourage groups to collaborate on a shared, multilingual translation, which can be performed at the end of the workshop. We will close with a discussion of the various transformations ‘home’ has undergone.
Talking Transformations: Home on the Move seeks to offer a platform to all those who feel a need to discuss what ‘home’ may mean at a time when the concept of ‘home’ in Europe is becoming more fluid, being challenged and reshaped, by unprecedented migration on the one hand and a surge in populist politics and nationalist rhetoric on the other. In 2017 we commissioned a British and a Polish poet each to write a poem on the theme of ‘home’ in response to public workshops held in Britain and Poland where participants explored the meaning of ‘home’ via creative writing exercises and debate. The poems were then sent into a linguistic and artistic ‘migration’ which resulted in multiple literary translations as well as translations into moving-image art. Between May and November 2017 the poetry and artworks travelled from the UK via France to Spain and back, and from Poland via Romania to the UK and back. The results of both journeys were then pulled together in a travelling exhibition, which will be partially installed at the Cultural Literacy and Cosmopolitan Conviviality Conference and the material for the workshop will be drawn from the exhibition. If possible, participants should bring their own mobile devices to the workshop.
Dr Manuela Perteghella is a literary translation theorist and independent researcher. She has published research in the field of literary and theatre translation, pioneering the theory of translation as creative and critical practice (Translation and Creativity, Continuum 2006; One Poem in Search of a Translator, Peter Lang 2008; Staging and Performing Translation, Palgrave 2011). She has taught translation at UK universities, and worked for various theatre companies. Manuela is the creator and co-curator of the art-translation exhibition TransARTation! Wandering Texts, Travelling Objects (http://transartation.co.uk/exhibition/) Now she blogs on The Creative Literary Studio, on the art of ‘text-making’. Web: https://thecreativeliterarystudio.wordpress.com/
Anne von PETERSDORFF (seminar paper)
Digital Nomads and Cosmopolitan Conviviality
Digital Nomads are people who are nomadic in the sense that they do not have a fixed home but live and work in constant transit. They are digital in the sense that most – if not all – of their work happens online: as authors, Instagramers, entrepreneurs, and crowd workers they live in short-term rentals and often work from co-working spaces or coffee shops. With physical and virtual access to global markets, ever-improving global connectivity, digitization, and the possibility of taking advantage of geo-arbitrage they are – in some ways – the epitome of a hypermobile and hyper-globalized elite.
My paper explores the cosmopolitan conviviality of Digital Nomads by examining cultural products used for the purpose of self-representation (e.g. blogs, vlogs, interviews, social media bios). Deconstructing the self-representation of Digital Nomads, I am particularly interested in exploring notions that run counter to the idea of ‘self-determined global citizens’ by asking to what extent the actions and feelings of this new global elite are subjected to the commands of neoliberalism.
Revealing the modes of their cosmopolitan conviviality, I hope to shed light on the complexity of the phenomenon and contribute to a better understanding of how social, cultural, economic, and political developments have shaped the rise of digital nomadism. Finally, I also wish to address the potential of a type of cosmopolitanism within digital nomadism that is not ‘from above’ and finds its manifestation in the digital infrastructure and virtual spaces of the internet.
Anne von Petersdorff is a scholar, filmmaker, and educator from Berlin, Germany. She recently finished her PhD in German studies with a certificate in Digital Humanities from Michigan State University. Her hybrid dissertation, ‘Unexpected Journeys: At the Crossroads of Collaborative Filmmaking and Feminist Scholarship’, is concerned with female bodies in transit and complicates the current economies of representation of women travellers. As part of her dissertation she created Wanderlust, cuerpos en tránsito (2017), a bi-autobiographical travel documentary (co-directed together with Maria Pérez-Escalá), which has been invited to several international film festivals in Europe and Latin America and aired on national TV in Argentina.
Jarosław PŁUCIENNIK (seminar paper)
Multilingualism and qualitative approaches to other cultures in Conrad and Malinowski
In my proposal, I would like to describe the relationship between multilingualism and cultural literacy. Outstanding examples of multilingualism in this context are Joseph Conrad and Bronisław Malinowski. James Clifford (1986) and Małgorzata Czermińska (2003) have written about their relationship and characteristics. One of these critics discusses self-fashioning and the other the narrative point of view. As Polish men of science and literature, Conrad and Malinowski are excellent examples of the crystallisation of both important narrative forms and ethnographic methods (participant observation). These two forms meet in the 20th century in immersive journalism. My central thesis is that the ability to switch between the anthropological approximation (focalization) and the all-seeing eye is an essential social skill resulting from multilingualism. I want to show this mechanism practically by focusing on Malinowski’s Journal and Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent by. It can be argued that the application of this new cultural skill is not the result of functional multilingualism, but rather the resulting need for continuous intercultural translation and consideration of other points of view. In this way, one can also argue that the cultural literacy resulting from multilingualism is to a great extent rationality, as Richard Rorty understood the term. From a theological point of view, multilingualism means accenting sense, not letters and mercy, which is the implementation of the Old Testament concept of justice. This is evidenced by the famous Open Letter on translating by Martin Luther. That is where we find the principle of focusing on the real language of real people – anthropological focusing.
Jaroslaw Płuciennik has been Rectors’ Proxy for Open Educational Resources since 2016. He used to be a Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Pol. prorektor) in charge of curricula and quality assurance and enhancement at one of the largest universities in Poland, University of Łódź (2012-2016). He is a full professor of the humanities, a student of cognitive analysis, doctor of cultural and literary criticism and theoryand the editor-in-chief of a scientific journal. He has graduated from the University of Łódź. He has also studied at the University of Lund, Sweden. He has researched at the University of Cambridge, UK and in many higher education institutions in Europe.
Eleonora RAPISARDI (seminar paper)
Re-Imagining Conviviality in Haitian Contemporary Fiction. Diasporic Cultural Imaginaries in Katia Ulysse and Roxane Gay’s Short Stories
This paper analyses two short-story collections: Drifting (2014) by Katia D. Ulysse, a Haitian writer who moved to the U.S. when she was a teenager, and Ayiti (2011), by the American writer of Hatian descent Roxane Gay. The aim of this paper is to look at how black women of Haitian descent attempt, through their writing, to fill the void that exists between a history written by the colonizers and the history as lived by the dispossessed, in what Stuart Hall calls ‘globalization from below’ (Hall and Werbner 2008: 346). Acknowledging the epistemological problem at the basis of globalization in its continuity with a type of cosmopolitanism based on a ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo 2009: 119), I argue that Katia Ulysse and Roxane Gay, in their short-story collections, describe a way of being that is cosmopolitan in a way dissimilar to Kant’s concept but closer to what Walter Mignolo has called ‘de-colonial cosmopolitanism’ (cf. Mignolo 2009). Those stories actively deal with epistemological colonial difference and I argue that the writers create a space in the collective imaginary for a diasporic dimension in which localisms can coexist without being either objectified or assimilated. As they both write in English, this paper also reflects on how cultural translation is carried out on the page, through both heteroglossia (cf. Bakhtin 1975) and metatranslation (cf. Steiner 1971).
Eleonora Rapisardi is a PhD candidate at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture in Gießen, Germany. She is currently spending a year at the Catholic University in Lisbon for a co-tutelle program. She is writing her dissertation thesis on Anglophone diasporic literature from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in relation to matters of cultural identity and representation. Her research interests include World Literature, Post-Colonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Cultural Politics. She earned her BA at University of Bologna with minors in Anglo-American and Spanish literature, before doing a Research Master in Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Utrecht.
A “poet queen’s” dominion: Carmen Sylva and her fairy tales as a medium of cultural literacy
In 1881, Elisabeth zu Wied became the first queen of Romania, which had recently gained independence from the Ottoman Empire under her husband Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Romania now incorporated three regions which had been under various different cultural influences, and was ruled by a German king who looked to Western Europe for cultural and political guidance. Hence, the public discourse on Romanian identity which had, as in many other regions, sparked uprisings in 1848, was rekindled.
In 1882, after having encountered much animosity by Francophile and anti-dynastic forces, Elisabeth published the Pelesch-Märchen under the pseudonym Carmen Sylva, a book of her own fairy tales inspired by the Romanian landscape and its people. The tales were initially given out to Romanian schoolchildren as prize books and were later published in Germany so as to promote awareness of Romanian culture in the queen’s country of origin.
It has been rightfully argued that the fairy tales formed part of a deliberate cultural strategy which aimed to tie Elisabeth’s name, and with it that of the Hohenzollern dynasty, to the new kingdom. However, the stories in themselves reach far beyond the invocation of a flourishing Romanian vision under German rule. I argue that with her Pelesch-Märchen, Sylva was not only trying to impose a new lore on her new dominion, but that her tales were generally intended as a medium of cultural literacy. My paper will explore the ways in which the author used the fairy tale genre as a means to mediate between cultures. It will also show how she consciously drew on 19th-century ideas on the interrelations between gender and cultural literacy in order to become known as the “poet queen” (regina-poetă).
Anja Rekeszus was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and completed her BA and MA in German Literature at the University of Heidelberg, with a one-year-long interlude at Oxford University. She is now a PhD-student at King’s College London working on how 19th-century women writers used fairy tales and legends as a means to participate in discourses of culture and national identity.
Cristina RIAÑO ALONSO (seminar paper)
A Stranger’s Account of Conviviality: Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll (1998)
After the referendum on Scottish national self-rule in 1997, much of post-devolution Scottish literature has been concerned with challenging Scottishness. By focusing on Luke Sutherland’s novel Jelly Roll (1998), this paper seeks to explore his questioning of essentialist and monolithic conceptions of Scottish identity and self-expression. It will be contended that this novel is particularly useful for this purpose in terms of scope, as the story follows the tour of a jazz band not only in the more cosmopolitan cities of Scotland but also in remote towns of the Scottish Highlands. Drawing from space and affect theories, this paper aims to study how, from his situated position as a black and Scottish writer, Sutherland scrutinizes issues of ethnicity and belonging in the nation. In order to do so, I will firstly delve into the novel’s depiction of the figure of the stranger, as embodied by its main character, Liam Bell, a black saxophonist from Irish heritage and with a Scottish surname. Through the different encounters with characters from a myriad of social positions and backgrounds, I will examine the depiction of the stranger’s inadequacy, as well as the systematic questioning of his identity and emotional attachments. Secondly, I will consider contemporary analyses of devolved Scottish culture and the alleged egalitarian status of Scottish ‘civic citizenship’ versus ‘ethnic citizenship,’ as proclaimed by the Scottish National Party. Thirdly, through the dystopian and often violent portrayal of Scottish society and its attitudes towards the stranger presented in the book, I will assess whether the text presents the failure of multiculturalism or gives hope for the creation of a convivial culture.
Cristina Riaño Alonso is part of the teaching and research staff at the University of Oviedo (Spain), where she is doing her PhD in the Gender and Diversity Programme. She holds a BA in English Studies (Minoring in German), and a Master’s Degree in Teacher Training in Secondary and Upper Secondary Education and Vocational Training. Her research areas are contemporary and postcolonial literatures in English and gender studies. She has undertaken periods of study to further her knowledge in these fields in the University of New Paltz (New York), the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and the University of Glasgow (Scotland).
Alison RIBEIRO de MENEZES (seminar paper)
Human Rights or Social Justice: How Might We Explain Refugee Experiences Today?
This paper draws on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Chilean Exiles and World University Service (WUS)’, which evaluates a refugee and exile scholarship programme from the 1970s and 1980s. WUS assisted approximately 900 Chileans fleeing repression in the wake of the Pinochet coup d’état in 1973, and the success of its programme would lead to the establishment of the British Refugee Council. The project has involved oral interviews with former scholarship holders as well as with the WUS professionals who administered the programme and supported them. One of the striking insights that has emerged from these interviews, and from discussions with contemporary NGOs on the lessons of the programme for refugee work today, is the strikingly different discourse that was successfully used by WUS: the language of international social justice rather than that of human rights. In a context in which victim culture prevails, rights hierarchies are increasingly deployed in political discourse, and in which cosmopolitan conviviality is seemingly challenged from the political right by populism, this paper asks if there is a need to change idiom and thus refocus social values. In contexts where social welfare and professional prospects are key to a successful life project for those individuals who migrate today for a variety of complex reasons, might a rights discourse be creating resistances? Might a refocusing on social justice thus permit greater challenge to such resistances and even reassert the values of the welfare state at a time when they are in serious retreat? Without offering precise conclusions, the story of WUS offers clear insights into how social justice worked at an earlier point in time to enable popular solidarity for Chileans against a Conservative, Thatcher-led government that was not enthusiastic about the scholarship programme.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick, where she is also currently Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Her research interests centre on contemporary cultural memory, with a focus on narrative and film. She has recently been conducting research on Chilean exile memories in collaboration with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. She is also working on cultural representations of and engagements with the disappeared in transnational perspective.
Abdelmajid RIDOUANE (seminar paper)
with Mustapha Kharoua
Cyber Communities: The (Dis)articulation of a Linguistic Hegemony
The correlation of the postmodern condition and the various englishes used by the cyber communities safeguards an understanding of how the digital age works towards a massive hegemonization of the English language that threatens to overshadow multilingualism. Conceptualizing these communities’ englishes from this perspective problematizes the mainstream definitions of multilingualism; it seems to position English as an antidote to multilingualism. In the globalist environment which networks us through modern technologies the world seems to be heading towards a neo-multilingualism, wherein ‘multi’ is cultural, while ‘lingual’ is exclusively English.
This could be argued through the correspondence of postmodernist tropes and the linguistic expression used by the cyber communities. The double-faceted social network multi-cultural linguistic performances, which these amorphous communities promote, promulgate the English language through a vulgarization of linguistic performance. This may include the ‘play’ with spelling mistakes, the ‘death’ of grammar, and the multimodal ‘collage’ of icons such as acronyms and emoticons. This trendy collective insouciance encourages non-native speakers to communicate in an ‘english’ they may – in fact – keep using continually, but only limitedly. While this condition seems to disarticulate and disempower English language performance, it actually articulates its hegemony and dominance. We seem to live in an era where the English language, which has become more ‘semiotic’ than ‘expression’, seems to cede its representation of concrete power to the transnational institutional corporate moguls. Considering the staggering statistics of the users of English worldwide, besides the English language’s supremacy in the fields of science, humanities, and technology, it may be argued that the aforementioned correlation may draw attention – at least in cyber space – to an overlooked dialectic between the demise of multilingualism and the rise of newer linguistic hegemonies.
Prof Abdelmajid Ridouane is Assistant Professor at Ibn Zohr University, Morocco, and coordinator of the Educational BA at the Faculty of Arts Languages and Humanities. Member of the CLAS Research Laboratory. Member of the Project Narrative Group in collaboration with Ohio State University. His field of research is Gender and Cultural Studies. Former lecturer at Gulf College, Muscat, Oman and teacher of English with Drama at Shakespeare Language Association in Bari and Trinitapoli, Italy. Awarded the Fulbright Scholarship for a Master’s of Arts at Michigan State University, USA. Worked as translator for the Art Moves Africa program based in Belgium
‘Bodies Unbound’ – negotiating adoptee identity and conviviality through culture
This paper intends to look at the project of conviviality through the lens of migration and identity politics, especially one connected to international adoption. The South Korean program of international adoption, which started in the late 50s, is to date the largest in the world, and although the numbers of international adoptions are now at a historic low, it is timely to look at how the diverse group of South Korean-born adoptees are organized globally and culturally. Largely aided by technology, many adoptees are currently forming new constellations of kinship across boundaries of countries, cultures, languages and religions and my focus will be on how a specific adoptee identity formation is negotiated through cultural forms of expression. To be even more specific, I will mainly look at artistic works by a selected group of Scandinavian adoptee writers, artists and performers, who attempt to translate the adoptee experience in different genres of aesthetic expression.
Questions that will be dealt with are:
- How is it possible to trace the formation of an adoptee identity in different forms of aesthetic expression?
- To what extent do adoptees represent a marginalized group in a larger Scandinavian context of conviviality?
- In what ways does adoptee culture voice a critique from within the so-called ‘Nordic model’?
- What can the adoptee experience tell us about bodies politic, conviviality and cosmopolitanism in our day and age?
I hope to shed light on how a historical phenomenon of forced migration has led to current debates concerned with new ways in which we can talk about ideas of identity and belonging, with the ultimate aim of creating a language that is inclusive of all aspects of adoption.
Aino Rinhaug is a Lecturer in Norwegian at UCLA and UC Berkeley. With a background in literary studies, she now works in the area of second language acquisition, adoption studies and is also a documentary film maker.
Invocation and Illumination: ‘Metaphoric Montage’ in Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer
Khaled Hosseini’s latest illustrated book Sea Prayer was triggered by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old Kurdish-Syrian refugee, who drowned in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. His death – as well as the death and disappearance of 4176 other refugees – is a baneful reminder of how fragile and elusive the ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Homi Bhabha) and everyday ‘conviviality’ straddling ‘race, culture, identity and ethnicity’ (Paul Gilroy) are in a post- 9/11 world. This paper explores Sea Prayer as an expression of ‘our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other’ (Gilroy) by focusing on Bhabha’s emphasis on the translational dynamics and temporality of suffering. It specifically draws on Bhabha’s recent concept of ‘metaphoric montage’ in which an Eisensteinian series of ‘short, sharply cut shots’ can be ‘an aesthetic and political practice’. Narrated from the point of view of the father of Alan Kurdi on the point of sending his son across the Mediterranean, Sea Prayer crosscuts between multiple, iterative temporalities – the father’s memories of the ‘normal’ Homs as a multicultural space of quotidian ‘conviviality’; his refugee’s son’s experience of ‘normalcy’ as blood, bombings and burials; the invocatory and incantatory mode of prayer; the ekphrastic ‘visual time’ of the illustrations; and the sobering, ironic reading-time for the reader who knows only too well that the prayer will go unanswered. However, while Bhabha investigates the metaphoric montage at work in postmodernist forms of literature and photography that play with syncopation, striation and metatextuality, Hosseini’s simple, direct Sea Prayer, poised precariously in the temporality between hostility and hospitality, abjection and aspiration, fate and faith represents, in its very fragility, an extremely powerful instantiation of affective interpellation.
Sneharika Roy is assistant professor in the Comparative Literature and English Department at the American University of Paris and a contributor to the encyclopaedic project Dictionnaire encyclopédique des littératures de l’Inde (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Indian Literature). Her book The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh (Routledge 2018) offers a fresh comparative theory of epic, bridging classical and postcolonial perspectives. She is also the author of a chapter on epic genealogies in the upcoming MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh.
Janaina SANTOS (seminar paper)
Notes to understand teachers’ education in English language and intercultural competence in the Brazilian context
This research presents results of a case study whose focus was to identify the relevance that undergraduates in Letters with qualification in English language and literature attribute to the intercultural competence in the teaching of the language – taken in the light of the studies of Applied Linguistics – in search of ways to broaden the meanings of the process of language teaching. The discussions on the subject are anchored in studies of Cook (2003), Rajagopalan (2003), Byram (1997), Hall (2003) between other scholars in the area. Understanding how the teachers in education perceive the culture in the everyday of the English class seems decisive in the understanding of how identities are constituted in a diversified way in different social spheres, what echo in education. In this way, a sensitive view is taken of the school institution and its subjects to different realities that constitute it, in order to meet the demands of its social groups. It should be noted that the reaffirmation of subjects’ identities permeates daily practices in the different micro space constituted in and by culture. It reaffirms the importance of the undergraduate course’s role in promoting intercultural competence and of the teacher in knowing the reality of his students for process of teaching and learning English. The analysis of the narratives in dialogue with Applied Linguistics theory allowed to perceive the reduction of language concept to linguistic elements, mainly those related to Morphology and Syntax, and the consequent disguise of cultural elements in teaching English language. We conclude that ordering and hierarchization of knowledge in Letters course still affirms the prevalence of studies of the linguistic system to detriment of those that direct future teachers for a broader understanding of teaching and learning process.
Janaina de Jesus Santos Post-doctoral degree in the Postgraduate Program in Letters: culture, education and languages, at the State University of Southwestern Bahia, holds a Doctorate in Linguistics and Portuguese Language from the State University Paulista Júlio of Mesquista Filho and Master’s Degree in Linguistic Studies by Federal University of Uberlândia. She is an Adjunct Professor at the State University of Bahia, she works in the Postgraduate Program in Teaching, Language and Society. She works in the areas of Discourse Analysis and Applied Linguistics, with an interest in contemporary subjects in the audiovisual, discourse and teaching, language teacher training and curriculum.
Luísa SANTOS (conference organiser)
Luísa Santos is Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Faculty of Human Sciences and CECC at the Catholic University of Portugal, in Lisbon, since 2016. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, Berlin (2015), with a scholarship from The Foundation for Science and Technology, an MA in Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London (2008), with a Gulbenkian Scholarship, and a degree in Communication Design, Faculty of Fine Arts-University of Lisbon (2003). In 2012, she conducted research in Curatorial Practice at the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm. Since 2017, she has coordinated 4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, a cooperation artistic and research project co-funded by Creative Europe.
Lisa SCHWANDER (seminar paper)
Amitav Ghosh’s Cosmopolitan Romance Worlds
In my discussion of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015), I trace the ways in which the trilogy develops enclaves of cosmopolitan conviviality within a 19th-century setting increasingly characterised by imperialist separations and hierarchies. Rooted in a specified time and place, Ghosh’s visions offer a cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ that differs strikingly from contemporary versions of free-floating cosmopolitanism. I will show that Ghosh consistently connects these enclaves to romance aesthetics and in doing so develops a political argument concerning the exclusion of (non-western) cosmopolitan traditions from modern politics. Ghosh’s trilogy follows the model of the historical romance, which tells a narrative of modernisation through setting itself up as a modern, realist novel, while also including within its narrative the ostensibly pre-modern form of romance in order to indicate spheres of the ‘not-yet modern’. Ghosh ironically adopts this literary form in order to critically assess what ways of life and sociality have or have not been granted a space within a modern political system. Ghosh’s romanticised cosmopolitan Asian world fictionally points towards the existence of an alternative early modernity as described by scholars of the Indian Ocean region (see for example Sheriff/Ho 2014): it is characterised by a dense network of transcultural connections and exchange, consisting of societies which elude the category of the nation that is central to modernity as we know it. Depicting this cosmopolitan world through the lens of romance and playfully reserving the realist sphere for an imperial model of cultural separation, Ghosh’s aesthetics criticise modernity’s one-sided association with this second political system: the trilogy draws attention to the process through which the western imperial model, positing itself in opposition to an alternative cosmopolitan pathway, becomes the only thinkable model of modernity in general. Ghosh thus employs his romance aesthetics to attack the modern political system for marginalising cosmopolitan traditions, affiliating himself with Prasenjit Duara’s (2014) demand to transform dominant social and political structures by including non-western traditions of thinking beyond the nation.
Lisa Schwander is an academic staff member and doctoral student at the chair of English Literature and Culture at Mannheim University, Germany. She holds a degree in English Studies, German Studies and History from the Universities of Heidelberg and Edinburgh. Her dissertation project Postcolonial Romance and Transcultural Modernities analyses the political use of romance traditions in the work of Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie.
Naomi SEGAL (conference organiser)
Professor Naomi Segal researches in comparative literature, psychoanalysis and the body at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published 96 articles and 18 books; her most recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (2009) and André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (1998). Her current research is on replacement. She has run Cultural Literacy in Europe (https://cle.world/) since its origin in 2007. She is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques, an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a Member of the Academia Europaea.
Abbas Khider as an Example of Literary Conviviality. And a tribute to the Chamisso Prize, Federal Republic of Germany
Beginning in the final decades of the 20th century, so-called national literatures have become sites and examples of inclusion, by hosting, so to speak, with a sense of naturalness, many authors whose mother tongue is diverse. These are authors who, while oftentimes originating from contexts of migration, subsequently managed to establish an intimate coexistence with the host language, to the point of attaining the level of literary literacy which has allowed them to gain multifaceted recognition. This is a well-known phenomenon in European cultures with a colonial past, such as the British and the French, but also in others, such as the German culture, a preferred destination for various migration movements since the 1960s.
n the present paper I aim to assess the most prestigious instance of the recognition of the contribution of generations of authors – whose mother tongue is not German – towards German-language literature – namely the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. Between 1985 and 2017 (the latest year it was presented) this Prize was awarded to 78 authors from more than 20 countries, spanning several continents. This prize has been a relevant contribution to the evolution and diversity of German literary language, but also, and perhaps above all, an eloquent political-cultural manifestation within the best European tradition of cosmopolitan society-building.
Following a brief history of the Chamisso Prize, with particular emphasis on a few key moments and authors, it is my intention to illuminate my reflections by introducing the most recent recipient of this award, the Iraqi-born Abbas Khider, ‘by no means an unknown and a real favourite of the feature pages of German newspapers’, as described in the 2017 Prize announcement. Khider, a German citizen since 2007, has published several works which are autobiographical in nature, and which recount his experiences as an immigrant and a refugee before reaching Germany in 2000.
Teresa Seruya is Full professor (retired since February 2017) in the Department of Germanic Studies at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, teaching German and Austrian literature and culture, history of translation and translation theory, translation methodologies and intercultural communication. She has collaborated with the Catholic University of Portugal. She is responsible (together with M. Lin Moniz and Hanna Pieta) for the ongoing research project ‘Intercultural Literature in Portugal 1930-2000: a Critical Bibliography’ within the CECC – Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture. She has published on contemporary German literature, migration literature, the history of translation in Portugal, translation and censorship. She is also a literary translator of the following German authors: Goethe, Kleist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Döblin, Thomas Mann and Kafka.
Decolonizing Late Style: Said, Adorno, Genet
Fifteen years have passed since the death of Edward Said – one of the leading public intellectuals of the 20th century – and the legacy of his writing is up for debate. It seems that there are various
‘Saids’: the postcolonial literary Said (of Conrad, of Beginnings, of Orientalism); the upright political Said (writing extensively on Palestinian politics, on exile, on the Arab world and Islam); the humanist Said (thinking on secular critique, on the role of the intellectual, on democracy and power); and even the aestheticist Said (drawn to classical music and style). My paper wishes to go beyond the disciplinary and professional distinctions, which Said himself fiercely opposed, and address these fields together, through a reading of his last book, Late Style – yet not as a late-life recourse to good old European culture, but rather as a critical political engagement with cultural conviviality, on the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
I suggest a decolonizing reading of this book, focusing on lateness as a critical modality that goes much beyond the individual style of a few great artists in their late creative periods. Said rejects the common view of late style as reconciling, serene and mature, and theorizes it as fractured, unharmonious, non-resolute, full of contradictions. Yet this image of lateness should be articulated culturally and politically. Reading Said between two polarized figures – Theodor Adorno, whose notion of Spätstil he adopts, the Jewish German intellectual of ‘damaged life,’ writing in the late stages of European Kultur; and Jean Genet, to whom he dedicates one of the chapters, the French writer who joined the Palestinians in their struggle – I show how Said performs his own critical lateness as disjunction between a cosmopolitan position and a Palestinian one.
Shaul Setter (PhD, UC Berkeley) teaches literature and theory at Tel Aviv University and Sapir college. He works on neo-modernist aesthetic-political projects in Europe and Israel/Palestine, and has published on Genet, Derrida, and S. Yizhar in diacritics and JSS. His book, Collectivity in Struggle: Godard, Genet, and the Palestinian Revolt of the 1970s is forthcoming in Lexington Books, 2019.
This paper focuses on two socially-engaged, participatory works by Chinese artist Yin Xiuzhen, International Airport Terminal I (2006) and Commune (2008), which were both created and first exhibited in Germany. Unlike Yin’s earlier participatory artworks, which reconsidered and restaged a conventional indigenous mode of Chinese communal dwelling, the two works discussed in this paper were based in the places where Yin had her artistic residencies and lived for a short period of time. In her works, Yin constructs a fluid, interactive communal space for herself and embodied viewers, albeit via heavily mediated means, to participate, experience and explore a particular aspect of local life, forging various forms of inter-bodily, intersubjective and intercultural communication and (dis)identification. Yin’s works investigate not only the temporary social connectedness and conviviality of artistic participation, but also those instances of contradiction and rejection that are part and parcel of attempts at collective cohesion and cross-cultural exchange, providing a distinctive insight into the practice of socially-engaged art within the increasingly interconnected, yet asymmetrically developed globalizing contemporary art world. This paper examines how Yin’s works might give rise to both interconnections and frictions between local and global, promoting mutual understanding, yet refusing to contrive an illusion of harmonious reconciliation; in what ways these two works reveal Yin’s collaboration and negotiation with international art institutions; and how an artwork, which tends to create a hospitable, convivial environment for interactive public engagement, might engender a totally divergent experience of participation marked by confusion and exclusion, due to the deficiency of intercultural understanding.
Vivian Kuang Sheng is an art historian in contemporary East Asian and transnational art and an assistant professor at the Department of Fine Arts, The University of Hong Kong. She completed her PhD, Fantasies of ‘Home-making’ in the Works of Yin Xiuzhen, Mona Hatoum and Nikki S. Lee (January, 2017) from The University of York, UK, and has taught contemporary art history and theory at The University of Manchester, UK. Her writings have appeared in Sculptural Journal, Liverpool University Press, and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.
Boaventura de SOUSA SANTOS (keynote paper)
Epistemologies of the south, ecology of knowledges, intercultural translation as conditions for subaltern cosmopolitanism
Abstract tbc
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a Professor at the School of Economics at the University of Coimbra, Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick and Director of the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra.
Snežana STANKOVIĆ (seminar paper)
Affective (In-)Tangible Translations
Sharing a lived experience with someone implies creating an intersubjective space in which a passing on/communication can occur. How does one create such a field to transmit and share deeply traumatic events, like war, flight, deportation?
With this paper, my aim is to provide a look at a specific semiotic artefact that can help live with and overcome trauma. I will draw metonymically on Journey of Waves, the short documentary by Linda Paganelli, which follows and immerses itself in the experience of flight and deportation (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avsq86eeSas&feature=youtu.be). Following Robert Armstrong and Steven Feld (1975; 2012 [1982]), my hope is to show how the film occurs as a cross-translation of sensibilities, stepping outside social and cultural framings. In the spirit of Purushottama Lal (1972), the documentary appears as a field of life that ‘transcreates’ and multiplies reality, going beyond the ‘original’ trauma. That is, it ‘adds another, additional reality’ (Kiener 2008) that as a ‘composed unity of external and internal environment’ (Geurts 2003), the Self and the Other, becomes a repository of hopes.
Dwelling on ethnography of emotions and participatory visual approach, I dare to opt for research that goes beyond the referential world, letting itself arise out of an ’affective presence’ (Armstrong 1971) between a researcher/filmmaker and their field-sister/-brother/-fellow.
Snežana Stanković is a PhD candidate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and a research fellow at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION (Frankfurt (Oder)). Rooted in narratology, historical and visual anthropology, her research work concerns funerary and mourning cultures. In her PhD project, she follows (dis)continuities of the past (conflicts, expulsion, displacement, absence) using cemeteries/monuments, archival sources and oral testimonies as research lenses. Together with the visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker Linda Paganelli, Snežana Stanković is researching funeral laments and the afterlives of missing persons in the (post-)conflict areas of the Western Balkans and Palestine/Israel.
Ángela SUÁREZ RODRÍGUEZ (seminar paper)
What’s the Reason for Homecoming? Conviviality Between the Lines of the New Afropolitan Narrative
The so-called ‘Afropolitan narrative’, as an emerging part of current Afrodiasporic literature, distinguishes itself, among other aspects, by the articulation of an identity discourse which, in Knudsen and Rahbek’s words, is marked by ‘a mobility-induced anxiety’. This, rather than the result of ‘a sense of loss’, has primarily been identified as the effect of their protagonists’ ‘experience of being acutely transient and always-already mobile’, without a unique sense of belonging (2017: 118). Nevertheless, despite the embodied transnationalism represented through the ‘culturally hybrid and multi-local’ subjectivities of their characters, these narratives ‘also display a scepticism’ towards ‘just, peaceful and ethically sound forms of conviviality’ (Neumann and Rippl 2017: 179). In particular, this becomes evident in the depiction of ‘an alternative ontology of return to Africa’ (Durán-Almarza, Kabir and Rodríguez González 2017: 109), which implies an inquiry into the ideal of Western urban cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, however, it simultaneously promotes ‘a diasporic cosmopolitanism’ as a form of ‘planetarian conviviality’ (Darieva 2011).
Drawing from Nigel Thrift’s premise that ‘new kinds of encounter and conviviality must’ essentially ‘include affect’ (2004: 58), this paper draws from the theoretical intersection between postcolonial, gender, urban and affect studies as a prism through which to analyse the spatio-emotional representation of homecoming in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2012). Besides expanding the classic notion of ‘return migration’ through an examination of its nostalgic depiction as a multidimensional experience which can now happen through virtual spatialities, this approach will also allow the celebratory mood of Afro(cosmo)politanism to be questioned. Ultimately, it will underscore the idea that modern African fiction ‘captures the essences of conviviality’ in both the Global North and South (Nyamnjoh and Brudvig 2014: 349), thus suggesting that current cosmopolitanism necessarily depends on a politics of location which reveals a different set of convivial practices and relations.
Ángela Suárez Rodríguez graduated in English Studies from the University of Oviedo (Spain) in 2015; afterwards, she enrolled in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women and Gender Studies (GEMMA). She completed her first year in this double degree at the University of Oviedo, moving to the University of Hull (England) during the second year of the programme. Her Master’s Thesis was defended at the University of Oviedo in July 2017. She is currently a ‘Severo Ochoa’ Scholarship holder as a second-year student of the Doctoral Program in Gender and Diversity at the University of Oviedo.
Orsola VANNOCCI BONSI (seminar paper)
Power and coexistence: an analysis of Ahlam Shibli’s series Dependence (2007) and Trackers (2005)
The contemporary social situation is composed of flows of people and thoughts, bringing different communities closer. This context produces clashes between cultures that differ deeply from each other, creating not only new forms of the concept of coexistence and conviviality, but also new ways of interaction and unprecedented power relations. This paper will analyse Ahlam Shibli’s work Dependence (2007) (Palestine, 1970), and the dynamics of power evidenced in it, compared to those highlighted in her previous work, Trackers (2005). Dependence is a series of pictures that explores the relationship between immigrant care-workers in Spain and the people who hired them, unveiling a coexistence built on relations of power and dependence. In the series Trackers, Shibli pictures the life of young Palestinian soldiers who decided to enrol, as volunteers, in the Israeli Army, highlighting the difficulties of two cultures that are living together in an eternal conflict. Paul Gilroy claims that a beneficial project of conviviality is produced through everyday multiculturalism (Gilroy, 2004), which is the daily-life encounter of diverse cultures: thus I wish to analyse the particularity of the situations of coexistence pictured by the Palestinian photographer, both representing the confrontation between two, almost polar opposite human groups. The paper aims to bring another layer to the discussion about conviviality which is related, as Sen (2006) points out, not only to human experience but also to the historical events that forged the contemporary situation.
Orsola Vannocci Bonsi is currently a student at the Lisbon Consortium, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where she is taking the Master in Culture Studies. Her main area of interest is the relationship between cultural identity, conflict and politics and how it is translated into art. Alongside her studies, Vannocci Bonsi is a freelance curator, working with an international curatorial collective based in Lisbon, Da Luz Collective, which aims to show, enhance and illustrate new artworks and emerging artists in a perspective of ‘vision’ and ‘visual’ criticism, realising exhibitions, projections and other events.
Catarina VAZ PINTO (keynote head-to-head)
Catarina Vaz Pinto is the Councillor for Culture at the Lisbon Municipality. She was State Secretary for Culture between 1997 and 2000 and Assistant Manager to the Minister of Culture between 1995 and 1997. She was also Executive Coordinator of the Gulbenkian Program for Creativity and Artistic Creation between 2003 and 2007, and co-founder of the Association Forum Dança, which she directed between 1991 and 1995.
Could online technologies open the door to new ways of learning about other cultures? The answer depends on a large number of issues. This paper will present some of the issues that were explored during a research project of around six years observing an online community made up of over 1000 participants from many parts of the world. For over 10 years the community, known as ‘Global Voices’ (globalvoices.org), has brought together an international network of bloggers, activists, human rights and defenders of freedom of speech, all united by the same enthusiasm for internet-powered new media and their possibilities. Community members exchange online and offline, and share various kinds of projects. Among these is a ‘newsroom’, in which they put together stories from around the world, most of them based on online independent media (like blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, among many others).
This research project used a monographic approach and gathered data through participant observation. The results suggested that many of the community members had experiences that could be seen as opening up their cultural horizons and developing their Intercultural Sensitivity (Chen and Starosta, 1997). Such experiences, which combined the reading, translation and curation of stories told in the first person (shared through online media), collaboration towards a common goal, and interaction in real life in biennial gatherings, seem to have made a major impact on Global Voices members and their view of the world.
I wish to share some of these experiences and analyse them in order to contribute to the conversations taking place around digital and cultural literacies. I will underline the importance of combining cultural and digital literacies, as well as the importance of online and offline exchanges as complementary experiences.
Laura Vidal has a PhD in Education Sciences from the University of Paris XII (UPEC) and is a member of the research team LIRTES, attached to the same university. She is also on the editorialteam of Global Voices, in charge of content from Latin American, Spain, Equatorial Guinea and other Spanish-speaking communities.
Ricarda VIDAL (Special Interest Group workshop & conference organiser)
Home on the Move: Intersemiotic Translations of ‘Home’
with Manuela Perteghella
Interlingual and intersemiotic translation, as the interpolation, overlapping, cross-fertilisation of different modes, senses and signs making up ‘meaning’, us to investigate perceptions of ‘home’ from different yet complementary perspectives. In this workshop, we will present our Talking Transformations: Home on the Move (www.talkingtransformations.eu) project and invite participants to explore their own notions of home via intersemiotic translation. In small groups, we will analyse two art films. Each group will then work on an intersemiotic translation back into poetry. We would like to encourage groups to collaborate on a shared, multilingual translation, which can be performed at the end of the workshop. We will close with a discussion of the various transformations ‘home’ has undergone.
Talking Transformations: Home on the Move seeks to offer a platform to all those who feel a need to discuss what ‘home’ may mean at a time when the concept of ‘home’ in Europe is becoming more fluid, being challenged and reshaped, by unprecedented migration on the one hand and a surge in populist politics and nationalist rhetoric on the other. In 2017 we commissioned a British and a Polish poet each to write a poem on the theme of ‘home’ in response to public workshops held in Britain and Poland where participants explored the meaning of ‘home’ via creative writing exercises and debate. The poems were then sent into a linguistic and artistic ‘migration’ which resulted in multiple literary translations as well as translations into moving-image art. Between May and November 2017 the poetry and artworks travelled from the UK via France to Spain and back, and from Poland via Romania to the UK and back. The results of both journeys were then pulled together in a travelling exhibition, which will be partially installed at the Cultural Literacy and Cosmopolitan Conviviality Conference and the material for the workshop will be drawn from the exhibition. If possible, participants should bring their own mobile devices to the workshop.
Dr Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, translator and curator. She teaches at King’s College London and is the founder of Translation Games, a research project into the theory and practice of intersemiotic and multilingual translation (www.translationgames.net). Recent publications include Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang, 2013), The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (with Maria-Jose Blanco, Berghahn, 2014), Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 (with Ingo Cornils, Peter Lang, 2014) and Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (with Madeleine Campbell, Palgrave McMillan, 2019). Together with artist Sam Treadaway she also runs the bookwork project Revolve:R (www.revolve-r.com), a collaborative exploration of visual communication.
She is a member of the core group of Cultural Literacy in Europe and, together with Madeleine Campbell, leads the Special Interest Group on Intersemiotic Translation.
These two volumes will be launched at the conference: