“Ach Ba Gá Dom Labhairt Leat:” An Foclóir Aiteach and the Presence of Queer Culture as Gaeilge.
Jenny Moran introduces An Foclóir Aiteach, a dictionary that writes queer terminology into the Irish language.
Somali
Aisha Afrah is a broadcast journalist at BBC World Service, she is a poet and a short fiction writer. Aisha has an M.A. in African Literature from SOAS University. Her interests include translation and multilingualism within the Somali territories. Her poetry explores themes such as home, womanhood, being a refugee and self-love. Dadka deegannada
Fictional translation in ‘Sāq al-bāmbū’ is erased in ‘The Bamboo Stalk’
Kuwaiti novel 'Saq al-Bambu' is presented as a text translated from Tagalog even though it was originally written in Arabic- however, the English translation completely erases the fictional translation aspect.
What is postcolonial philology?
S. Shankar argues that postcolonial philology can present "a powerful way of plumbing the depths of that dauntingly deep and shifting ocean of historical experience that we call the modern colonial encounter and its aftermath".
To Win the Nobel Prize, Write in a European Language
July Blalack argues that The Nobel Prize in literature is failing its global audience due to its near exclusive focus on literature written in European languages.
Only a quarter of translated fiction originally written by women
Only a tiny fraction of fiction published in English is translated, and only about a quarter of that translated fiction was originally written by women. And yet there are so many amazing women-authored books out there in the world – books we’re missing out on
Hassan Blasim’s Refugee Narratives: Travelling Between Fact and Fiction
As ‘kan ya makan’ implies, Blasim’s stories are and they are not: they impress upon readers the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, particularly at a juncture when tales of migration are gaining political and literary attention
Reading group with S. Shankar (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)
S. Shankar's work challenges reductive understandings of ‘world’ as presented in theories of ‘world literature’ and critiques conceptualisations of ‘literature’ as influenced by Western ideas of the ‘literary’
Reading group on Education and Comparative Colonialisms
Education systems, and the literary works they prioritized, are an excellent inroad to outlining how literary forms and cultures responded to colonialism
Reading group with Javed Majeed (King’s College London)
Javed Majeed joined us for an informative and enjoyable reading group where we discussed his work on the Linguistic Survey of India and its superintendent, George Grierson.