Events

About the Event
In March of 2021, controversy arose over the choices for a Dutch and Catalan translator of Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” Alex Marshall’s article in the New York Times discusses how translating Amanda Gorman’s work has “shone a light on the often unexamined world of literary translation and its lack of racial diversity.” More recently, in September 2021, M. NourbeSe Philip called for the destruction of an unapproved translation into Italian of her novel Zong!. To what degree are these issues around translation due to a lack of critical conversations about race and language in our conceptual and pedagogical work in languages, literatures and cultures?

Brown University's second biennial Modern Languages Conference, Cross-Talk: Conversations on Race & Language, will question how events related to race, racial justice, and social justice have become transnational and impact the languages, literatures, and cultures that we teach. How can scholars and educators adapt curriculum and lead through languages in an effort to address racial and social justice in the world? How do languages change to become part of this global dialogue? And how does this dialogue cross borders and change between and within languages? How do race and language overlap and intertwine in our fields of study?

Partner Events
Virtual Event
Workshops, Conferences, Seminars

The event is organized by the Center for Language Studies at Brown University in collaboration with the Departments of Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, French and Francophone Studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian Studies, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Slavic Studies, Literary Arts, as well as the Center for Middle East Studies, the Brazil Initiative, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.