CTIS Seminar: Dr Ruth Abou Rached, "Reading Iraqi women’s novels in English translation: Iraqi women’s stories"
| Dates: | 18 April 2024 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 14:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Speaker: | Dr Ruth Abou Rached |
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Since the 1970s, Iraqi women writers have engaged with translation as part of their creative expression and literary activism. Until recently, there was little research on how stories by Iraqi women are mediated in English translation. This gap is surprising in view of Iraq’s ‘paratexts’ of war which have kept the country in high international profile for decades.
In this lecture, I give an overview of my book Reading Iraqi women’s novels in English translation (2021) and explain why I have coined the term ‘feminist paratranslation’, as a nascent analytical framework which interrogates and blurs categorical borders between text and paratext, translation and paratranslation, translator and paratranslator. The writers in focus, are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, six writers whose story-making in Arabic enact a politics of resistance to wider discourses of conflict that seem to configure Iraq as on the brink of destruction.
By exploring the ways by which Iraqi women’s stories have emerged in Arabic and English in different circumstances, I draw attention to how Iraqi women’s novels do tribute to the lives of Iraqi people in past and recent contexts of publication. I also explore feminist paratranslation as a useful analytical framework while exposing its potential limitations.
Speaker
Dr Ruth Abou Rached
Role: Lecturer in Arabic Cultural Studies
Organisation: The University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A113
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
