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The World Republic of Translation.

The role of transfers in creating literary fields and trends in humanities in Central and Eastern Europe from the 19th c. to the present.

Wrocław, 18-19.11.2024

Reflection on the literatures and cultures of Central and Eastern Europe uses a postcolonial perspective to explore issues related to the region's place in European modernity, of which coloniality of power has been an integral part. The Postdependence Studies Centre, a scholarly research network in Poland, has developed its own critical perspective emphasizing the essential difference of Polish (as well as regional) historical and cultural experience vis-à-vis the experience of the colonies of European empires, but within the shared paradigm of the experience of coloniality.

The 2024 Postdependence Studies Centre annual conference will focus on the phenomenon of cultural transfers and their role in the formation of literary fields, critical schools and discourses in the humanities. We are interested in how political and social contexts have influenced the politics and strategies of literary and academic/intelectual transfers from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The conference aims to trace the dynamics and diversity of such influences, and then outline a topography of translational transfers in the countries and regions of Central and Eastern Europe that will show both the trajectories of hegemony and routes of transnational exchange dictated by mutual inspiration and, also, resistance to hegemonic trends.

Translation has played an important role in the development of literary languages, and in the transformation of literary forms, poetics and perspectives. It is through inspiration across language boundaries that literature can be both cosmopolitan and rooted. The study of translations reveals patterns of cultural and literary influences and flows. This, in turn, invites questions about the politics of translation: the rationale implied in these patterns, implemented both by the institutions of culture and social life and by the influential centers that create literary fields: journals, publishing houses, critical and academic schools, and the authority of the translator.

 Also, transfers of discourses in the humanities is an extremely important phenomenon for the study of trajectories of influence. Through post-colonial/postdependence/decolonial critical perspectives, these transfers reveal structures of domination in a globalized cultural marketplace and make it possible for us to study processes that determine hegemonies in various intellectual fields.

 Central and Eastern Europe is an example of inequality in the system of cultural transfers. The cartographies of hegemony and dependence reveal the cultural politics of worldliness and worlding in the sense developed by Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. We would like to discuss the worlding effect of literary transfers and currents in the humanities both in the context of political transformations in postcommunist countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as globalization processes in culture and the position of Central and Eastern Europe on the map of cultural influences and translation routes from the 19th to the 21st century.

We would like to invite discussions on the following and related topics:

• world literature models, especially those taking into account relations of hegemony and subordination;
• hegemonizing and/or decolonizing/emancipating implications of cultural transfer through translation;
• "hospitality of the word": the domestication of genres, styles, trends, literary schools, intellectual and academic currents;
• translation in the humanities: self-colonization or participation in universal academic and intellectual discourses?
• national literatures, regional literatures, minor literatures and multilingualism - border zones in literary transfers;
• translation as a practice of border knowledge (border gnosis) striving for inclusivity and recognition;
• biotranslations, indigenous onto-epistemologies, neurdiversity, animal studies and other new translation zones;
• cultural politics determining transfer processes: international trends, national contexts, the role of institutions (literary awards, support for translation);
• translation as intercultural dialogue and a vehicle for cultural diversity;
• translation as a form of activism: decolonial, minority, ecological and political contexts;
• Untranslatability in literary transfer: the untranslatability of social, political, cultural and linguistic contexts and their (im)possible representation in translation.

Please send abstract proposals up to 300 words with a short bionote and affiliation (in one file) to the e-mail address: transferconference@gmail.com by 30.06.2024

Conference fee: 400 PLN or 100 Euro

Acceptance notice will be issued by 15.07.2024 r.

Organizing Committee:

Dr. habil. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław

Prof. dr. habil. Joanna Orska, Institute of Polish Studies, University of Wrocław

Dr. Joanna Maj, Institute of Polish Studies, University of Wrocław and Institut fuer Slavistik, TU Dresden

Alexis Angulo Martinez, University of Warsaw

Mateusz Szczepaniak, University of Wrocław

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The Scientific Board of the Postdependence Studies Centre:

• Professor Hanna Gosk, University of Warsaw
• Dr. habil. Magdalena Horodecka, University of Gdańsk
• Professor Inga Iwasiów, University of Szczecin
• Dr. Emilia Kledzik, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
• Dr. habil. Dorota Kołodziejczyk, University of Wrocław
• Dr. Dorota Krawczyńska, Institute of Literary Research  of the Polish Academy of Sciences
• Dr. habil. Marta Tomczok, University of Silesia in Katowice 
• Dr. habil. Dorota Wojda, Jagiellonian University

Volume 7 in the Postdependence Studies book series to be released in spring 2019.

The publication examines the legacy of peasantry in Polish literature and culture.

Volume 8 on the Polish experience of humiliation and shame from the partitions until the present day is currently in preparation.