Provincializing Internationalism: Periodicals, Publishers and Practices I: Translating

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Papers in this stream analyze the construction and (re)negotiation of communist/socialist internationalism through cultural institutions (e.g., periodicals, publishers, film studies, theaters) and practices (e.g., translation, layout design, performance), focusing on the opportunities they created for local agency, forms, and meanings within the transnational pursuit of socialist politics. Contributions address different periods of state socialism (pre-WWII, post-WWII) and places within the Soviet Union, socialist Eastern Europe, or other parts of the world in a comparative manner. Panel I addresses the central role of translation in socialist internationalism by looking at various periodicals and institutions from the 1920s to the Cold War era. The papers collectively demonstrate how translation served to negotiate linguistic and cultural differences while constructing internationalist imagination.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Anastasia de La Fortelle, U of Lausanne (Switzerland)

Papers

• From Techne to Device: The Role of Translation in Comintern Aesthetics - Brian James Baer, Kent State U

• The Kharkiv Conference of Revolutionary Writers, 1930: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Leftist Periodicals Network - Elena Zemskova, Tel Aviv U (Israel)

• Contradictions of Soviet Internationalism: Translation Practices in Golosa molodykh and Tverskoi bulvar, 25 - Olga Nechaeva, U of Pennsylvania

• Uzbek Stories for English Readers: Cold War-Era Translations of Uzbek Literature in the Journal Soviet Literature - Sabrina Jaszi, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Susanna Witt, Stockholm U (Sweden)