Translated Feminisms: China and Elsewhere

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Translated Feminisms: China and Elsewhere

An International Workshop at Columbia University, NY
October 16 -17, 2009
754 Schermerhorn Extension

Participants

       Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia University)
       Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn College)
       Marilyn Booth (University of Edinburgh)
       Amy Dooling (Connecticut College)
       Yukiko Hanawa (New York University)
       Gail Hershatter (UC Santa Cruz)
       Michael Hill (University of South Carolina)
       Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Michigan)
       Janet Jakobsen (Barnard College)
       Rebecca Karl (New York University)
       Dorothy Ko (Barnard College)
       Joyce Liu (National Chiao Tung University)
       Lydia Liu (Columbia University)
       Viren Murthy (University of Ottawa)
       Mae Ngai (Columbia University)
       Beth Povinelli (Columbia University)
       Tze-Lan Deborah Sang (University of Oregon)
       Neferti Tadiar (Barnard College)
       Elizabeth Weed (Brown University)
       Marilyn Young (New York University) 

For more information please visit http://translatedfeminisms.org/

Sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University

In an ongoing translation project, Lydia Liu, Dorothy Ko, Rebecca Karl (NYU), and Michael Hill (University of South Carolina) have been rendering a body of seminal feminist texts from Chinese into English: Jin Yi’s Women’s Bell (Hill) and He Zhen’s radical critique of Chinese tradition from the Tien Yee (Liu, Ko, and Karl). Our goal is to publish these translations so that they can be used as assigned texts in undergraduate and graduate courses on feminist texts, world revolutions, and modern China. We hope that the publication of these core texts will help remedy the situation of near total absence of the voices of non-Western theorists amongst the essential texts of feminism from the pre-World War I period.

The proposed workshop is divided into two parts. Firstly, we invite established as well as young scholars from China, Japan, Europe and the U.S. to present their current work on gender, feminism, and the social revolution in the late Qing and modern China. Secondly, we will pre-circulate the typescripts of our translations of Women’s Bell and He Zhen’s theoretical essays from the Tien Yee in an in-depth text-reading session. The goal is to ready them for publication and to develop an introduction to these translations. Finally, we will discuss future collaborations, workshops, translation, and publication projects.

The inter-disciplinary workshop is a collaboration between Sinologists and scholars who work in other geographical areas. We invite colleagues from Barnard and Columbia to act as interlocutors to the scholars of the China field by suggesting further linkages and comparisons.

Schedule

             
Friday