Speakers
- Lindsay Griffiths Brown, English and African American Studies
- Oriele Benavides Salazar, Spanish and Portuguese
Details
"Translating Arturo Schomburg: Mistranslation, Accident, and the Fluidity of Identity"
Lindsay Griffiths Brown, Ph.D. Candidate in the Departments of English and African American Studies
This paper focuses on Afro-Puerto Rican historian and book collector Arturo Schomburg. During and beyond Schomburg’s lifetime, people often misinterpreted his ethnic identity due to his rich intellectual, social, and political background. This paper reads Arturo Schomburg’s ethnic identity, then, as a mistranslated text. Through a redefinition of mistranslation as accident rather than error, I argue that supposed misunderstandings of who and what Schomburg was are not so much erroneous as they are generative in providing insight into how he moved fluidly among multiple communities.
Lindsay Griffiths Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of English Literature and African American Studies at Princeton University. Prior to graduate school, she earned her B.A. from CUNY Hunter College in English Literature and Spanish Translation. Her research examines African American and Afro-Caribbean writers, their translators, and the texts between them. In this triangulation, she centers translations as works that reframe our understanding of their sources and contribute meaningfully to Black social and political life. Lindsay is also a published translator of such works as Mercedes Cebrián’s Burp: Adventures in Eating and Cookingand a selection of poems in Almudena Vidoretta’s Algunos hombres insaciables. She is also the co-translator of a forthcoming short story collection by Mario Michelena.
DISCUSSANT
Rafael Cesar, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
MODERATOR
Maria Smith, Ph.D. Candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
"The decanting of a singular voice into a plural body: literary feminisms in the work of Margo Glantz"
Oriele Benavides Salazar, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Is it possible to propose a genealogical relationship between the female authorship that emerged strongly after the Latin American literary boom, on the one hand, and the feminism of the continent that, around the same time, began to acquire a political consistency unheard of until then?
In her dissertation, Irradiations of a plural body: Literature and Feminist Activism in Latin America in the 80s, she proposes a review of certain gaps in the archive of Latin American literature written by women during that period. Benavides Salazar postulates that such writings drew on the organizational possibilities and public visibility of feminism that was contemporary to it, to interrogate and legitimize the writing of feminized authorship.
Using contemporary concepts of feminist political analysis as those of body-territory and domestification, her presentation shows how early novels by Mexican writer Margo Glantz, as well as her cultural activism around the 4th Iberoamerican Conference of Women Writers, outline some innovative coordinates for the unfolding of the Latin American novel of its time.
Oriele Benavides Salazar is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese where she is writing a thesis entitled Irradiations of a plural body under construction. Literature and feminist discourses in Latin America during the 80s. In her dissertation, she evaluates several women’s encounters that took place in Latin America at the end of the past century, articulating simultaneously and in a new way artistic expression, street mobilization, literary and cultural theory, feminist activism and democratic discourse about the role of women and non-masculine citizenships. Learn more.
DISCUSSANT
Lilianne Lugo Herrera, Theatre Arts, University of Miami; PLAS Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer
Open to students, faculty, visiting scholars, and staff. A boxed lunch will be provided while supplies last.