&Now 2019 Conference

Does convergence always entail what the Antena Collective refers to as "the discomfortable?" Is translation always a conveyance that reworks its source, leaving part of it as something that cannot be said, a detritus in the margins of a worldly order marching inextricably forward?  These four writers and critics take on these questions in relationship to their own and other writings as they address their own national and ethnic origins. Zhang Er considers her Chinese heritage as a writer who writes in Chinese and then works with translators to publish this work in English.  Of interest to her is how specific Chinese contexts become opaque once translated into English and how in rendering these into English new poetic possibilities emerge, sometimes valuable in themselves, if erasing other realities. Susan Gevirtz examines her Eastern European Jewish background focusing on how the narratives and poetry of Jewish identities are often intermixed with multiple and intersectional national and ethnic accounts while at times suppressed from these accounts. She asks more basically, what should one make of the strange desire to do family archeology? How is this "history" necessarily discomfortable and unsettling?  What diverse sources must be turned to—memories, dreams, fieldwork, family lore—to invent and escape the limitations of past accounts? In writing on Greece today, Eleni Stecopoulos explores the ways diaspora and ecology inform each other in the poetics of place, where people are not figures in a timeless landscape but contemporary actors and artists responding to austerity, migration and displacement, loss of biodiversity. How is the idea of the oikos unsettled by contemporary social practice, including poetry and site-specific performance, to make new forms of kinship, economies, and interspecies song?  How to write diaspora not as a myth of return but an ecology of present conditions and multiple identities? Quenton Baker works in what Saidiya Hartman calls the “enormity of the breach” created by chattel slavery. His work asks what it means to survive within the uninhabitable, to have a full inner life while being overdetermined as object? How to call absence into being through speech, how to translate a dominant, violent English into an English that can properly attend to Black interiority, free from the semiotics of a society/world that requires Black death and trauma to arrange itself. He is after a language that unmakes the world through interior spaces,  that might be possible through poetics.