My talk on "Translation and Language Justice in and Beyond Europe” will focus on “language justice,” (a term that does not as-yet refer to a clear field or critical problematic), as a rubric for a vision of language politics straddling law, official global language policy, and language rights under conditions of imperialism and cultural conquest. Drawing on Benjamin Constant’s anti-Napoleonic broadside The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in Their Relation to European Civilization,” (1814), which diagnosed the psychic violence of linguistic occupation, I will adapt and extend his association of cultural usurpation to contemporary cultural contexts in and beyond Europe. Constant associated usurpation with an existentially grave condition in which each act of articulation becomes a form of self-harming; attacking the site where individual consciousness, auto-identification and affective social ties constitute a fusional core of self and collective identity. The talk will consider the impact of an abrogated “right to language” on political life, from the targeting of languages spoken by immigrants, minorities and noncitizens to the hastening of language extinction as a global phenomenon particularly threatening to the survival of Indigenous languages. I also take up the matter of how generative AI, bolstering the kind of nationalist monolinguism that leads to “English only” language policies as well as the practice of instrumentalized linguistic streamlining conducive machine translation, is emerging as a new political force of linguistic usurpation and conquest.

About the speaker

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.

Apter’s books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006). She has also published extensively in Third Text, e-flux, October, boundary 2, New Literary History, Littérature, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Translation Studies, Cabinet, The Global South, Grey Room, Boston Review, differences, and Public Culture, among others.