Translations and Transformations
China, Modernity and Cultural Transmission
March 2008 - February 2010
Directors
Professor Mary Jacobus (Director, CRASSH)
Professor Hans van de Ven (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
The AHRC-funded Network, based at CRASSH focuses on the oppositions and relations through which Chinese modernity has been shaped and imagined. The aim of the three-way Network is to create and sustain relationships with academics in the UK, China and the US. Through a programme of workshops, seminars, meetings, visiting fellowships, and international conferences at Cambridge University in the UK, Yale University in the US, and Tsinghua University, PRC, the Network will play a key role in developing research capacity in an area of contemporary importance.
An age of globalization makes it more than ever urgent to ask: what processes of transmission mediate literary and cultural exchanges between China and the West? China's complex interactions with its others are key to understanding its relation to modernity. Defining the modern, as Lydia Liu observes, is not only a question of periodization but also of translatability: 'The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity... The fact that one can speak about a varied range of modernities suggests an extraordinary faith in the translatability of modernity and its universal ethos.' (Translingual Practice,1995).
Liu's 'translingual practice' refers to the translation from one culture into the practice of another: to cultural as well as linguistic translation. At the heart of the problem are specific acts, sites, and theories of translation; relationships between universal and particular; and the limits or possibilities of cultural commensurability. Whether literal translation or at the level of language and culture, or involving concepts, technologies and techniques, the status of translation is at stake in defining the field of Chinese modernism and modernity. The processes of transmission include literary and visual translation, as well as contextualization and reception, but they also raise issues of translatability in the broadest sense. The Network will involve scholars of literary and cultural studies in China and the West, including translation theorists, critical theorists, and theorists of visual culture and film.
The activities of the Network are organized into three strands:
- Translating Modernism
- Translating Theory
- Translating Culture
