Events

Olin 202 & RKC 103  1:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
In their 1992 open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, African American writers Audre Lorde and Gloria I. Joseph protested a recent wave of deadly attacks on refugees in East Germany by connecting it to tacit violence against people of color and the “fundamental questions of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia […] within the German psyche that have not been publicly examined and addressed in the last 50 years.” Instead of easily buying into the commemoration ritual of German Reunification, Lorde and Joseph measured the success of German memory culture by its effect on their lives, asking “Why has the dismantling of the Berlin Wall meant that we now feel less and less safe as Black Women visitors [...], lest we be insulted or attacked?”

Today, their question reverberates against the backdrop of multiple “refugee crises” and the rise of right-wing extremisms across Europe, with German’s AfD party growing in popularity. This one-day symposium builds on Lorde and Joseph’s protest letter to explore transnational connections and narratives of resistance in Germany and across the Atlantic. We seek to explore how marginalized groups have politically and historically advocated for justice by drawing parallels of remembrance against forgetting across different cultures, spaces, languages, bodies and times. By realizing parallels across multiple geopolitical histories of migrant activists, feminists, workers, Europeans of colour, Sinti and Roma populations and refugees we want to generate interdisciplinary discussions on the uses of memory as resistance.

We invite various artistic, academic and activist perspectives to provide new perspectives that broaden the clusters of Memory, Resistance and Colonial Hierarchies of Belonging. While our focus is on Germany, we welcome contributions from other contexts that comparatively address how Western colonial, imperial, transnational, and transatlantic memories are tied and translated to other regions and contexts.

This event is co-sponsored by: Rethinking Place Bard-On-Mahicantuck, A Mellon Foundation "Humanities For All Times" Initiative, Central European University, Gender Studies Department, The Hannah Arendt Center, The Literature Program, The Politics Program, The American And Indigenous Studies Program, The Philosophy Program, The History Program, The Human Rights Program, The Language Center, The Dean's Office, The Division Of Languages And Literature, and Bard Center For The Study Of Hate.Schedule:1:00-2:30 PM (Olin 202) 
Panel 1: Memory Making, Trauma, Colonialism, and Resistance
Tường Vi Nguyễn (Freie Universität Berlin) "Survival Consciousness: A Decolonial and Critical Phenomenological Approach"
Ain Ul Khair (CEU), “Memory-Making and the Question of Nostalgia”
Peter Odak (CEU), tbd
Ali Hashemian (CEU), “The Making of the Civilized Iranian Man: Masculinity, ‘Civilization’ and Race in the Interwar Nationalist Discourse in Iran”
 
2:45-4:00 PM (Olin 202) 
Panel 2: Jessica Varela (CEU), “Gendering Blackness, Migration, Coloniality: Una Marson, Claudia Jones, and Audre Lorde in the UK and Germany” and Bard respondents Gabriella Lindsay, Jana Schmidt, Vivian Hoyden

4:30-6 PM (RCK 103) Keynote: Michelle M. Wright (Emory), “Time to Re-Member: A Physics of Queer Black Belonging”

Ross Benjamin, translator

Discussant: Jana Schmidt
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.

"This new and scrupulously faithful translation of the Diaries brings us...the true inner life of the twentieth century’s most complex and enigmatic literary prophet." —Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities

Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.

Ross Benjamin’s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, and Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.

Jana Schmidt is an assistant professor of German Studies at Bard College. She writes about German and American, transatlantic and exilic literatures.

In Fall 2024, we will introduce a language class in Yiddish! But what is Yiddish?
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Yiddish has no clear boundaries of either space or time. Some speak of the beginning of Yiddish at the end of the 19th Century, with the novels of Mendele Mokher Sforim. Some go back a further century to the stories of Rabbi Nakhman of Braslev. And some go back to the 13th and 15th centuries. Some people say that it’s a dead language, and some people would be quite upset by such an assertion. Some contradictory images of Yiddish are that it is the language of poor ignorant people, but that Yiddish has reached impressive cultural feats in literature and criticism, poetry, the theater, and even in the cinema. Some people think that Yiddish is a sad language, and others think that it is actually funny.

Insight to Yiddish language, history, and culture (and the forthcoming Yiddish courses in 2024–25) will be provided in an information session on Thursday, April 18, at 2 pm, in Weis Cinema.


Download: What-is-Yiddish-Information-Session.pdf

Wout Cornelissen, University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law (Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL) 
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Several political theorists have pointed to a contradiction in Arendt’s The Human Condition. On the one hand, the book appears to argue that action is possible anytime, anywhere: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” On the other hand, action appears as conditioned–without lawmaking, no space would exist in which action could appear–and finally, due to the rise of “the social” in the modern age, action seems to have become altogether unavailable to us. Looking for ways out of this seeming contradiction, with a view to understanding “the gift of freedom,” Wout Cornelissen turns to The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s investigation into the three mental activities she regarded as “constitutive for all political action,” a book project she conceived of as “a kind of second volume” to The Human Condition. By analyzing specific passages from the newly constituted text of The Life of the Mind, which he co-edited for the Complete Works: Critical Edition and which is based on Arendt’s original typescripts, he will present a reading of her unfinished work that offers resources for answering Arendt’s critical interpreters.

Dr. Wout Cornelissen is appointed as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Law at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He co-edited the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind (Wallstein, 2024), which appeared as vol. 14 of the Complete Works: Critical Edition. He published essays on Arendt’s conceptions of thinking in the Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt (2020) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch (Fordham UP, 2017). Previously, he taught at FU Berlin, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and VU Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Political Philosophy from Leiden University.

with Fatima Naqvi, Professor of German and Media Studies (Yale University)
Olin Humanities, Room 204  6:30 pm – 8:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the short span of a hundred and sixty years, hospitals became ubiquitous in Western society. But initially this institution was met with opposition from a host of critics and commentators. Today, the hospital seems nearly invisible, even though it bookends the beginning and end of most people’s lives. This talk by Dr. Fatima Naqvi focuses on Vienna in the twentieth century as the privileged site for an exemplary tale about the hospital’s rise, the suspicion it faced, and its contemporary evolution.

The Architecture of Illness investigates hospital building styles, tracing the hospital’s transformation from a dispersive site of health care to a massive digital interface. Using examples from literary works by Arthur Schnitzler, Rainer Maria Rilke, and films by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, it analyzes certain key words in discussions of hospitals to reveal the many intersections of architecture and health.

Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of German and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, Chair of the Film & Media Studies program and the European Studies Council. Prof. Naqvi’s work is situated at the intersection of literature, film, and architecture. It is deeply committed to curmudgeons, naysayers, and querulous types: Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke, Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke, and Ruth Beckermann are her privileged subjects of research.
 

A Reading and Conversation with Translators C. Francis Fisher and Kathleen Heil, moderated by Prof. Éric Trudel
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
C. Francis Fisher is the translator of Joyce Mansour’s In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems (World Poetry, 2024); Kathleen Heil is the translator of Meret Oppenheim’s The Loveliest Vowel Empties (World Poetry, 2022). Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) and Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) were arguably two of the most important female surrealist figures of the 20th century. Fisher and Heil will be in conversation about their translations on Tuesday, October 1.

About the translators:

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator who received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has been supported by scholarships from Breadloaf
Writers Conference, Brooklyn Poets, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry May ’24.

Kathleen Heil is an artist whose practice encompasses dance/performance and the writing and translating of poetry and prose. She is the author of the poetry collection You Can Have It All, forthcoming with Moist Books November 2024, and the translator of The Loveliest Vowel Empties, Meret Oppenheim’s collected poems (World Poetry, 2023). Her literary translations appear in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Originally from New Orleans, she lives and works in Berlin.

Dr. Ulrich v. Bülow
(Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Leiter Archiv)
 
Olin Language Center, Room 206  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Seit seiner Gründung 1955 erwirbt das Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach Dokumente von und über Franz Kafka. Die Sammlungen umfassen das Process-Manuskript ebenso wie Kafkas Briefe an Milena Jesenská, Grete Bloch und an seine Schwester Ottla. Vor einigen Jahren tauchten in Paris Kafkas Maturitätszeugnis auf – Deutschnote: „befriedigend“. Dokumente von Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftstellern wie Max Brod, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Martin Walser, Peter Handke oder Barbara Köhler zeigen, wie Kafka nach seinem Tod im Westen zum Klassiker wurde, während man im Osten nach dem Verdikt von Georg Lukács im Leipziger Reclam diskutierte, ob man seine Werke überhaupt veröffentlichen sollte.

Der Leiter der Archivabteilung Dr. Ulrich von Bülow, der die aktuelle Ausstellung Kafkas Echo mitkuratierte, stellt die Marbacher Sammlung vor.

Olin Language Center  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Meet faculty, students, and staff, learn about new courses, explore study abroad opportunities, and enjoy food and drink at the FLCL Open House!