Cross-Talk - Conversations on Race and Language

Cross-talk: Conversations on Race & Language

Brown University Modern Languages Conference ‘22

February 24-26, 2022; In-person Presenters with Hybrid Format for Audience

Brown University’s second biennial Modern Languages Conference Cross-Talk: Conversations on Race & Language will be held February 24-26, 2022. Conference organizers are now soliciting proposals for individual panel presentations.

In March of 2021, controversy arose over the choices for a Dutch and Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.”  Alex Marshall’sarticle in the New York Times discusses how translating Amanda Gorman’s work has “shone a light on the often unexamined world of literary translation and its lack of racial diversity.” More recently, in September 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip called for the destruction of an unapproved translation into Italian of her novel Zong!. To what degree are these issues around translation due to a lack of critical conversations about race and language in our conceptual and pedagogical work in languages, literatures and cultures? 

This conference will question how events related to race, racial justice and social justice have become transnational and impact the languages, literatures, and cultures that we teach. How can scholars and educators adapt curriculum and lead through languages in an effort to address racial and social justice in the world? How do languages change to become part of this global dialogue?  And how does this dialogue cross borders and change between and within languages? How do race and language overlap and intertwine in our fields of study?

We are soliciting papers related to questions of race and language in the following thematic areas, although we welcome other ideas as well: 

• Migration, Exile, Displacement, Mobility 
• Racial Politics of Translation, Race and Translation 
• Global South-South dialogues of Race, Language, Literature, and Culture
• Transdisciplinary Connections with Africana, Asian and Asian American, Indigenous and Native American, Latin American and Latinx, and Middle Eastern Diasporas and Studies
• Teaching Practices, Pedagogies, and Curriculum/Program Design
• New Forms of Knowledge and Expression (Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, anti-colonial, archipelagic, de-cold war, decoloniality, deimperialization studies, etc.)

 Please submit an abstract of no more than 150 words by Wednesday, December 15, 2021.  We welcome abstracts from graduate students and will announce competitive travel grants in our acceptance letters.  

 Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 4, 2022.   Please address your questions to any one of the conference organizers:  Jane_Sokolosky@brown.edu, Jeremy_Lehnen@brown.edu, Zachary_Sng@Brown.edu or Olga_Blomgren@Brown.edu.

 This conference is organized by the Center for Language Studies at Brown University in collaboration with the Departments of Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, French and Francophone Studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian Studies, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Slavic Studies, Literary Arts as well as the Center for Middle East Studies, the Brazil Initiative, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.