PLAS Graduate Workshop | Alex Diaz-Hui & Julia Kornberg

PRESENTER: Alex Diaz-Hui, Ph.D. candidate, Department of English

“Anticolonial Ensembles in the Américas: Collective Voice and Authorship in the Late Twentieth-Century”

Anticolonial Ensembles in the Américas: Collective Voice and Authorship in the Late-Twentieth Century asks how Hispanophone Caribbean poets and performers think of their work not as individual acts, but rather wider collectives and networks throughout the Caribbean, the Américas, and West Africa. I examine different venues for performance, including poetry open mics, theatrical spaces, and nightclubs to underscore how the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diaspora think of their works as produced in ensembles. By analyzing ephemera, music recordings, and audiovisual material, I bring to light various elements of cohabitation in performance that considers how ensembles can create new configurations of authorship in the American and Caribbean literary canon.

Alex Diaz-Hui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton. He is originally from the Pacific Northwest, where he received his BA (summa cum laude) from Portland State University and his MA from Oregon State University. Alex writes on Caribbean poetics and music, sound studies, ethnomusicology, and music technology. Alex is also a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and noise artist who works in a variety of musical genres.

DISCUSSANT: Lilianne Lugo Herrera (Ph.D., University of Miami) Theatre Arts; PLAS Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer

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PRESENTER: Julia Kornberg, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

“Translation is a virus: exophony and exile in Copi’s life and work”

Translation is a virus: exophony and exile in Copi’s life and work analyzes the fundamental figure of translation as a central category to understand Copi (née Raúl Damonte Taborda), his work in theater and literature, and the subversive usage of the French language in his narratives about exiled Argentines and Uruguayans in Paris. Through an analysis of La Internacional Argentina and La ciudad de las ratas, and an extensive look into the archival sources of Copi’s work found at the IMEC institute in France, my work proposes that the figure of translation works as a viral pathology in Copi’s work, inundating everything – from the conception of the manuscripts to the narrative structures and the world that his characters inhabit – and becoming a key category to understand his work. By drawing from the notions of translation developed by Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges and Lawrence Venuti, I propose that the figure of translation has, then, the capacity of crystallizing and disentangling the inter-lingual space of Copi’s work, which takes place between Spanish and French, as well as the glotopolitically subversive character of his novels.

Julia Kornberg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and IHUM. Her dissertation looks into the relationship of Latin American writers to translation during the Cold War, following four cases in Argentina, Cuba and Brazil. In 2021, she published her first novel Atomizado Berlín with Club Hem in Argentina and Scaraboquio in Mexico. Her second novel, Las Fiestas, is forthcoming with Editorial Sigilo. She has contributed with literary criticism to magazines such as The Drift, Bookforum, The Baffler, The Believer, Astra Magazine and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

DISCUSSANT: Neil Blackadder, Translator in Residence, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication (PTIC)

MODERATOR: Pablo Pryluka, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History

Open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff . A boxed lunch will be provided while supplies last.