Conferences and Seminars in Postcolonial Writing
| August 29 | Masterclass: The Novelist, the Translator, and the Word Maureen Freely Outside the Anglophone world it is not uncommon for novelists and poets to engage in translation. Though many will do so to make ends meet, others speak of translation as a form of deep study - a way of gaining an inside understanding of the works they most admire. In seeking to educate themselves through translation, they do not just enrich their own writing. They also enter into the great conversations of world literature. And sooner or later, they come to see how this conversation is constrained by censorship. In this session Maureen Freely will discuss her own travels through the hybrid spaces of contemporary letters. After describing her stormy and life-changing experience of translation, she will set out to explain how her work as a translator has gone on to transform her work as a novelist and a campaigner for free expression. Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. She was educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University) and has spent most of her adult life in England. A professor at the University of Warwick, she writes frequently in the British press on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. She is perhaps best known for her translations of five books by the Turkish novelist and Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk and for her campaigning journalism after he and many other writers, scholars and activists were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness or the memory of Ataturk. Her sixth novel, Enlightenment, was published in 2007. Like her work-in-progress, it is set in Istanbul.
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| September 5 | Poetry Reading David Morley This event is an opportunity to hear David Morley read from his poetry, followed by informal discussion. An ecologist by background, David Morley’s poetry has won fourteen writing awards and prizes. His latest collection Enchantment (Carcanet) was a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year. ‘Enchantment is a profound and tender work which confirms Morley’s place at the helm of British poetry today’ – Poetry Review. His previous collection The Invisible Kings (Carcanet) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. David is also known for his pioneering ecological poetry installations within natural landscapes and the creation of ‘slow poetry’ sculptures and I-Cast poetry films. His creative writing podcasts are among the most popular literature downloads on iTunes worldwide: two episodes are now preloaded on to all demo Macs used in Apple Stores across the globe. He writes essays, criticism and reviews for The Guardian and Poetry Review. He currently teaches at the University of Warwick where he is Professor of Writing. www.davidmorley.org.uk
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| September 14 | Public Lecture: Walter Benjamin, and other Illegal Migrants Professor Robert Young The lecture will consider the circumstances of Walter Benjamin's death as he attempted to smuggle himself across the border from France into Spain in the context of the available route for refugees out of France in 1940. These routes will then be compared to earlier and later routes in and out of Europe, demonstrating that contemporary migration into Europe follows paths already well-travelled over the centuries. It will be argued that it was Europe itself which initiated modern mass migration together with the contemporary world of boundaries and borders, and that the 'illegal' migrants who move across continents today are engaged in new forms of transnational subaltern struggle. Free admission - register before Monday September 5 on (03) 9905 2100
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| September 15 | Masterclass with Professor Robert Young“Cultural Displacement and the Space of the Untranslatable” Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. His White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), and Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), have been some of the most influential books in the field of postcolonial studies. He has also written Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008), and is currently writing a book on translation. Prior to moving to New York, Young was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford University. As a graduate student at Oxford, he was one of the founding editors of the Oxford Literary Review, the first British journal devoted to literary and philosophical theory. Young is General Editor of the quarterly Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
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| October 3 | ‘Nile Baby's’ African RootsA Writers and Their World Seminar by Professor Elleke Boehmer  Elleke Boehmer is internationally acclaimed for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and history, with particular focus on questions of migration, identity and resistance in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Her studies Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995; 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002), and Stories of Women (2005) have impacted substantially on the field. Among numerous other publications are the cultural history, Nelson Mandela (2008), Empire Writing, 1870-1918 (2008), the British bestseller Scouting for Boys (2004), and Cornelia Sorabji's 1934 India Calling. She has co-edited collections of essays on transnationalism (2002) and the new South Africa (1990 and 2005), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (2009), and The Indian Postcolonial (2010). She was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘South Asians Making Britain’ 1870-1950. Elleke Boehmer has published 4 novels: Screens Against the Sky (1990: shortlisted David Higham Prize); An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000: shortlisted Sanlam Prize), and Nile Baby (Ayebia, 2008), and Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (Jacana, 2010), her first book of short stories.
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| October 6 | A Postcolonial Aesthetic? Australian, South Asian and African Literature and Film This symposium invites you to engage with an innovative approach to the postcolonial by extending its current contextual and political analysis through attention to textual forms, strategies and values. By foregrounding the possibility of a postcolonial aesthetic (Boehmer, 2010), the symposium seeks to develop a body of criticism as yet unchartered, and the ways in which it may enhance our understanding of literary and cultural studies. |
Past and Present Conferences and Seminars
Visit our archives of conferences and seminars - recordings of many papers are available for download: