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Canceled: World Literature as Translational Multiplicity: Sabahattin Ali’s “Comprehensive Germanistan Travelogue”
March 30, 2020 @ 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Note: This event has been canceled.
In 1929, while studying abroad in Germany, modernist Turkish author Sabahattin Ali wrote a 10-page letter home to his friends in Turkey which was meant to be a pseudo-historical travelogue. In her talk, Kristin Dickinson argues Ali’s Ottoman Turkish exposed Potsdam as a site of translation for his modernist imagination. Translation thus emerges as a productively unsettling, omnidirectional movement that underscores the hybridity of Germanness and Turkishness alike. Ali’s Travelogue also provides a prescient alternative to conceptualizations of world literature that would emerge in Turkey in the following decade.
Kristin Dickinson is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Michigan. Her research on contemporary German and Turkish literature examines the potential of translation, as both a formal and a social medium, to intervene in nationalist ideologies and nationally structured areas of study. Her teaching and publications have focused on questions of world literature, multilingualism and cross-linguistic remembrance, the reappropriation of ethnic slurs, nationalism and the history of language reform, and non-ethnic modes of belonging. At the core of her research lies an interest in challenging racial and ethnic definitions of German- and Turkishness.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Romance Studies, the Center for European Studies, the Center for Global Initiatives, and the UNC Translation Collective.
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