Cultural Complexities
Afromexicans: The Forgotten People
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laurence French
In 1946 a seminal ethnohistoric study about Afro descendants was published in Mexico and aside from few scholars, policy makers, and educators who lauded the work, the groundbreaking research was ignored. Mexico had built by then a powerful sense of being a mestizo—mixed race—nation founded on the encounter of the Spanish conquerors and the native population. For three centuries Mexicans lived under a caste system, abolished upon independence in 1821. The new country began to shape its ideology of nationhood based solely on the notion that those two groups conformed the roots of its existence. It completely erased the contributions of thousands of the Afromexicans. It took two hundred years after independence to formally begin to recognize that Mexico is a mestizo country based on three broad groups: Indigenous, African, and Spanish. This paper examines Afromexican development and the current efforts to resurrect the “third root” of the nation’s mestizaje.
Third Space of Creativity: Visualising the Inevitable Misinterpretations of Language Transmission through Collaborative Practices in Visual Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clive Barstow
This paper presents a creative interpretation of Homi Bhabha’s theories on third space, realised through creative collaboration between artists in Australia and China. While third space theory conveys a socio-political space of conflict and incommensurability, this paper proposes that visual art can re-imagine third space as a non-political liminal space unhindered by language differences, offering a shifting and dynamic space between cultures, between philosophies and within opposing ideologies. Through this intervention a new working space emerges that fosters interaction and negotiation outside our lived experiences and beyond our normal perceptions of how life and art can interact. The transfer and translation of complex knowledge and ideas across language divides inevitably involves miscommunication and misinterpretation, producing a form of poetic thirding that perhaps better represents the realities of cross-cultural communication. Within this in-between language, divergent cultural histories are critiqued and explored, proposing the notion that traditional linear history-telling no longer represents the realities of dynamic cultures in flux. Several key thinkers on space and place are examined to contextualise an abstract notion of time and space that re-presents history as a series of relational non-synchronous moments in time, while offering artists fertile ground for collaboration that is no longer restricted by language translation, or by the established hegemonies of our constructed histories. The paper offers two case studies in which intimate artistic collaborative practice can reverse third space polarity as a space of conflict, replaced by an imaginative space in which timeless interactive thirding occurs through art-making and ongoing creative communication.
Translating/Transferring Literature at the Margins: The Place of Literary Translation in Independent Australian Publishing
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Holden
In October 2022, the small Australian press Giramondo published Septology by Jon Fosse, collecting the Norwegian novelist’s seven-volume opus into a single, dense, 752-page paperback. A year later, in October 2023, Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The publishers at Giramondo could not have known that Fosse would become a Nobel laureate when they acquired Damion Searls’ translation, but their decision to publish the book in Australia has paid off in the transfer of considerable cultural capital, even if Septology will never be a Knausgaard-style best-seller. Publishing literary works in translation represents a commercial opportunity for publishers, a chance to build their lists and a way to transfer cultural capital. This study aims to understand the factors that affect how literary works are acquired, translated and published by independent publishers in Australia. Data on translated works from publishers’ websites, catalogues and other public sources is analysed to determine the influence of factors including language of origin, prominence of authors, media publicity and literary prizes on the decision to acquire works. This is complemented by interviews with publishers about the role of translated works in their lists, their acquisition practices, and the perceived incentives for and barriers to publishing works in translation in a small market. The study uncovers how independent publishers use a range of strategies to balance the transfer of cultural capital through translation with the commercial demands of trade publishing in a market dominated by the big multinational publishing conglomerates.
