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When unequal worlds shadow words, what is translation? If, as Naoki Sakai opines, "translation never takes place in a smooth space" but is fundamentally "an address in discontinuity," such is all the truer in contexts of imperialism, settler colonialism, enslavement, neocolonialism/imperialism, and globalization, where the ground on which languages-in-translation "meet" seizes and buckles. Here discontinuity--which confounds the logic of equivalence that declares that X in one language "means" Y in another--exceeds language as such. As Lydia H. Liu reminds us, "when predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterize the material conditions of that exchange," we must listen closely for "the granting and withholding of reciprocity of meaning-value by one language vis-à-vis another." In this seminar, we will interrogate the role of translation across the (post)colonial power divides of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, examining how empire deforms and reshapes the theory and the practice of translation: intra/interlingual, ontological, epistemological, cultural. Translation, literary and otherwise, looms large in modern imperialisms, their reverberations, and reactions thereto: complicit, resistant, ambivalent. Shuttling between critical translation theory, literary history, and what Waïl S. Hassan has dubbed "translational literature," we will explore how the translation/empire nexus drives world literary and historical transformations--and how asymmetrical exchange creates not only the "universals" that underpin empire and globalization, but also the "particulars" that issue from and against those universals.

We will engage a web of interrelated questions. How have representatives of modern empires--invaders and traders, preachers and teachers, scholars and bureaucrats--marshaled translation to control their would-be subjects? How have intellectuals in colonized or semi-colonial or post-emancipation domains, in turn, invoked translation to resist, subvert, or embrace their dominators and key logics of modernity? Why have modern literary-intellectual "awakenings" worldwide--from the Bengal renaissance to the Arab nahḍa, from the Chinese May Fourth movement to pan-African négritude--taken such charged translational forms? Based on that history, how might we theorize (post)colonial translation in linguistic, affective, material, and political terms? Finally, what are the implications of the translation/empire nexus for world or comparative literature and for empire/postcolonial/critical race studies today? Would an emancipatory politics of translation rest on translatability, untranslatability, or an altogether new logic?

Our readings and discussions this spring will unfold in four movements: "Between Theology and History: Seduction, Violence, Conversion, Subversion"; "(In)Commensurability: Particulars, Universals, and the Riddle of Sovereignty"; "Mediations: Language on the Cusp of Empire, Nation, Race, and Diaspora"; and "Global Anglophony, Resistant Translation, and the Imperialist Information Age."

20% Class Participation: Includes mandatory office hours; attendance and in-class contributions; three 500-word Canvas discussion posts on readings, posted 24 hours prior to the classes for which readings are due; and three 100-word replies to others' posts

20% Oral Presentation + Handout: 20- to 25-minute oral presentation (plus Q&A) on an assigned reading during a class session of your choosing, with pre-circulated 2-page handout or PowerPoint slides

10% Final Paper Prospectus: 2-page proposal for final paper

50% Final Paper: 18- to 20-page essay that articulates a comparatist thesis and analyzes 2 major assigned theoretical texts (within these parameters, may pursue a problem that engages research interests)