Matthew Harrington is PhD candidate in the Department of English at Temple University. His dissertation, “Translating Revolutionary Politics in the 19th Century,” studies the role of translation in the emergence of nineteenth-century political concepts as they traveled in various documents and literary genres through the Americas and broader Atlantic world. A 2019 Bread Loaf Translators Conference participant, he is currently translating Spanish Civil War journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales’ historical short stories, and has co-organized a seminar on translation as a material practice for the upcoming ACLA annual meeting.
About the Talk:
For Stuart Hall, the value of theorizing ‘articulation’ turned on how it “enables us to think” the historical contingency of social forces and their coming together with particular discourses. How might Hall’s thinking push us to see translation as a political tactic deployed to articulate social forces to discourses by transforming the meaning of insurgent ideas? Join us, as Matthew Harrington discusses the constitutive function of translation in formations of revolutionary political thought. Spurred by contemporary political developments such as the Spanish Indignados movement, this talk will look to translation’s revolutionary past to offer a new perspective on the creation of transnational solidarities in the present.
Location: Williams Hall, 255 S. 36th St.: Cherpack Lounge (room 543)
Hosted by The Theorizing Colloquium Series of the Program for Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
All welcomed!