Tag: Activism

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Antifascist Architectures Call for Submissions

Ramparts: A Barricade Forum is currently seeking contributions for our next themed series, “Architectures of Antifascism.” From the physical structures of antifascist struggle (the barricade, the autonomous zone, the agricultural collective), to digital configurations (the VPN, the net commons, CV dazzle) and spatial language which describes organizational relationships (distribution, horizontality, the cell, the web) how do antifascist entities use and maneuver within space? We welcome text and media submissions which engage the spatial aspect of resistance from the micro-level of design to large-scale configurations of transnational solidarity. 

Send your submissions and pitches to submissions@barricadejournal.org.

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Local Activism/Global Fascism Call for Submissions

The climate change crisis demands of us a reevaluation of the connection between the local and the global. Meanwhile, the pandemic has given rise to a renaissance of mutual aid efforts around the globe. In India, response to laws targeting smaller farmers in favor of corporations ultimately brought about what may have been the largest general strike in the history of the world. 

Ramparts: A Barricade Forum is currently seeking contributions for our next themed series, “Local Activism/Global Fascism”. We are interested in submissions–whether textual, visual, or multimedia–that address the connection between local issues and larger-scale authoritarianisms from a variety of angles. From detailed descriptions of how day-to-day activism has been affected by large structural forces to commentaries on unexpected international parallels, we’re excited to use our platform to highlight relationships of scale.

Send your submissions and pitches to submissions@barricadejournal.org.

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The Time of Now: An Interview with the Editors of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism

In a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism, published over the summer, Turkish journalist and translator Ayşe Düzkan offers an anecdote: At a conference in Istanbul in 2014, she was tasked with providing a consecutive Turkish interpretation for one of the speakers, a British Marxian anthropologist. His comments centered on the Gezi Park uprisings that had captured the world’s attention just a year before. Though it was only his second visit to the city, he did not seem to recognize the irony in speaking to a Turkish audience, many of whom were directly involved in the protests, about an event in which he was not himself involved, and in a language they do not speak. Would a Turkish writer with no knowledge of English be invited to comment on Occupy London, she wonders? That such a scenario seems unlikely is no coincidence. The absurd performance Düzkan observes illustrates how the politics of translation affect not only the distribution of linguistic access (so that desired information may be limited for speakers of a certain language), but also the distribution of intellectual authority (so that speakers of a certain language may be ‘taught’ their own history through an interpreter).

Continue reading “The Time of Now: An Interview with the Editors of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism”

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Review: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism is a collection of thirty-one contributions, spread vastly across geographies and time periods, published in June of this year. The contributors address the theme of the handbook by deploying methods ranging from literary analysis, historiography, linguistics, and legal studies, and with styles ranging from the personal and essayistic to the rigorously academic. In the introduction the editors, Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian, invite and guide readers through the staggering and eclectic contributions by focusing on the nuances of the term “activism,” while Paul Bandia’s afterword draws attention to the fact that “the postcolonial condition is highly conducive to situations of activism,” and the undercurrents through the book that address regions and peoples under conditions of subalternity, (post)coloniality, and globalization. In addition to these two broad theoretical umbrellas, the contributors also share influences by a handful of key thinkers who are cited often throughout the individual pieces, most notably Mona Baker, to whom the book is dedicated, as well as Maria Tymoczko and Lawrence Venuti. Continue reading “Review: The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism”