Translating America/America Translated: A UC Faculty-Graduate Symposium

Susan Gillman
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

Kirsten Gruesz
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

This symposium on new hemispheric geographies and languages for American literary studies returns to historical moments that allow a reconsideration of language crossings as geographic alternatives to nation-bound paradigms. A 1998 conference on American empire at UC Santa Cruz produced groundbreaking work that has since become foundational, shifting the study of American cultures irrevocably away from an Atlantic-centered narrative of national development, and correspondingly toward languages other than English. Now, twenty years later, we revisit a once radically revisionist geo-timeline, dating to the 1998 centennial of the Spanish-American-Cuban War and recasting the history of US empire back from Cuba 1898 to an earlier time and place in the border treaty with Mexico in 1848. Critically examining the state of the discipline today, this symposium looks back still earlier: to the later eighteenth-century suturing of colonial to national studies that has proven exceptionally fruitful for scholars working across indigenous and multiple European colonial languages. Just as California’s demographic diversity prefigures that of the future United States at large, the University of California is rich in the human resources needed to re-invent a usable past for American cultural and literary studies.