Translation and the Production of Knowledge in Southeast Asia
Cornell University
Southeast Asia Program
Seventh Annual Graduate Student Symposium April 15-17, 2005
The Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia 640 Stewart Ave
Ithaca, NY 14850
Keynote Address by Vicente L. Rafael, University of Washington
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Cornell Southeast Asia Program invites graduate students working
across the disciplines to submit papers that explore multiple theories and
practices of translation and their relationship to the production of
knowledge in and of Southeast Asian contexts. From the earliest history of
the region until the present, discourses of the individual and the cosmos,
of gender, of the ethical, the social, and the political, have emerged
through processes of translation. Of particular interest is how translation
has been essential to the production of these discourses in the pre-modern
period and how they have influenced, and been influenced by, colonial and
(post-) modern forms of knowledge. Participants will collectively consider
translation as a contested or negotiated site of textual or social practice
and the degree to which the term is a useful critical idiom for Southeast
Asian Studies. Analyses will ideally entail a series of interdisciplinary
explorations drawing from a wide variety of sources ranging from religious
and literary texts to art and architecture and ethnographic studies of
social and cultural practices and institutions. Papers are invited to
discuss the relationship between translation and the production of knowledge
in light of the following panel sub-themes:
I. The Production and Institutionalization of Expert Knowledge
II. Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Practices of Symbolic Consumption
III. The Ethics of Translation in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Literatures
IV. Gender and Sexual Difference
We ask that prospective presenters submit a one-page abstract and
curriculum vitae by February 1, 2005 to: DCL33@cornell.edu. Papers should be
in English with a reading time of no more than 20 minutes.
Final papers will be due by April 1st for circulation to symposium
participants. A limited number of modest travel grants are available.