NeMLA Panel 2017 - Blasphemous Translation
This is a CFP for a panel at NeMLA 2017 in Baltimore, MD.
In The Location of Culture (1991), Homi Bhabha introduces the term “cultural translation” as a way to read how “newness” enters the “world,” i.e., postcolonial and minority voices, even if the result might be “blasphemy as a transgressive act of cultural translation” (225-27). Blasphemy, read as a form of newness (which Bhabha decouples from Rushdie’s fatwa and links to survival and dreaming), is then an attempt to desacralize what is already established as sacred, or canonical.