Bodies in Translation

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel explores moments of contact between language and embodied experience in modern Jewish culture. Specifically, it examines authors and artists who strive to transcend the limits of linguistic representation by harboring bodily ways of knowing. We seek to emphasize the various intricate relations between translation and the body, by focusing on bodily manifestations used for rethinking conceptual categories, and the ways in which these categories limit remembrance, memorialization, and the conditions of bodily intelligibility. Moving beyond traditional understandings of translation as a mere trope for the condition of Jewish Diasporism, we propose new ways to think about translation and its relation to modern Jewish identity. We are interested, for example, in translational interactions that go beyond the encounter between two languages, thus extending from the textual to the material domain, from texts to bodies and objects. We are also interested in how the encounter between translation and the body generates non-reified means of remembrance of the dead, and how the encounter between the material and the translational unsettles the discursive inscription of the Jewish body throughout modernity. Taken together, our papers explore artists who engage with materialist aesthetics to formulate alternative, embodied modes of meaning making that escape hegemonic conditions of cultural intelligibility.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

Cosponsor

• Pilot Division: Disability Studies

Individual Presentations

• Modernist Ancientness and the Hebraic Body in Melting-Pot U.S. - Danny Luzon, University of Haifa, Department of English Language & Literature

• Between Text and Textile: Transmedial Gestures in Anni Albers’s Six Prayers - Simone Stirner, Vanderbilt University

• Translation as Prosthesis: Yiddish Literature and Disability - Anna Torres, University of Chicago

• Yiddish Art Making and the Defiance of Monolithic Medium in the Post-Revolutionary Soviet Sphere - Noa Tsaushu, Columbia University