Matthew Harrington Doctoral Defense - Friday, 4/8 at 1 PM via Zoom
Committee: Lawrence Venuti (Emeritus), James Salazar, Katherine Henry, Anna Brickhouse (University of Virginia)
Title: Translating Revolutionary Politics in the Atlantic World, 1776-1853
Abstract:
My dissertation studies the role of translation in the emergence of political concepts as they traveled through the Atlantic world in various discourses and genres of writing. A practice vital to new revolutionary governments, exiled or internal dissidents, and international abolitionists alike, the translation of political writing supported movements and expanded their scope by, I argue, not merely circulating, but actively transforming such concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” and “public feeling.” Our study of this phenomenon has been limited by the tendency to misconstrue translation as transparent communication, the transfer of an unchanging meaning. Against this tendency, my study understands translation as an interpretive act that necessarily varies the meaning, form, and effects of whatever materials are translated. I examine cases of translation that generatively intervened in two decisive moments for the transnational production of ideas understood as foundational for “Western” modernity: the Age of Revolutions and the abolitionist period. I offer close readings of the translation of state papers, political theory, and literature by African American educator Prince Saunders, Venezuelan diplomat Manuel García de Sena, Irish abolitionist R.R. Madden, and French writer Louise Swanton Belloc. They demonstrate how key insurgent ideas were forged through cultural exchange in more textured, dynamic historical complexity than we have yet grasped. As the project traces their resignification around the slaveholding Atlantic through French, Spanish, and English, it pushes the disciplinary boundaries of comparative literary history to treat translations as objects of study in their own right, worthy of sustained and systematic analysis.
Contact tara.lemma@temple.edu for the Zoom link!