Migration, Diaspora, Contexts

The second event of a new series featuring translators who are first or second generation immigrants or who identify as part of a diaspora, this installment features: Amy Sara Carroll, one of the collaborators in the Transborder Immigrant Tool; Eiko Otake, whose work as a movement artist and translator has addressed the legacy of the atomic bomb in Japan; and Dagmawi Woubshet, who has translated (from Amharic) the letters of AIDS orphans to their deceased parents.

Thursday, May 4, 6:30PM
McNally Jackson Books
52 Prince Street
This event is part of the PEN World Voices Festival
More info: https://worldvoices.pen.org/session/kitchen-table-translation-migration-diaspora-contexts/

Moderator:
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu Kaza is a writer, educator, translator and artist based in New York City. Her translations from Telugu include works by contemporary feminist writers Volga and Vimala. She edited the Spring 2017 issue of Aster(ix) entitled “Kitchen Table Translation: Diaspora, Migration, Exchange.”

Panelists:
Amy Sara Carroll is the author of SECESSION (2012), FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography(2013), and REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (forthcoming). Since 2008, she also has been a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Recently, she was named a 2017-2018 Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow.

Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York-based movement artist, performer, and choreographer who for more than forty years worked as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she has directed and performed a solo project, A Body in Places, and, in collaboration with photographer-historian William Johnston, a series of exhibitions showing her dancing in ruined Fukushima, and elsewhere. She teaches an interdisciplinary course about the Atomic Bombings and Nuclear disasters at Wesleyan University and Colorado College.

Dagmawi Woubshet is an associate professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, and co-editor of Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo. His writings have appeared in publications including Transition, The Atlantic, and African Lives: An Anthology of Memoirs and Autobiographies.

Presented in grateful partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Aster(ix) Journal.