&Now 2019 Conference

This panel focuses on multilingual, multimodal literary networks. It addresses the points of convergence between multiple languages, translations, transcreation, and activism and examines the way that communities have written and are writing through and against local, national, global, and language networks. Rather than focusing on a specific language, media format, cultural community, or geographic location, this panel hopes to engender a variety of responses to the state of innovative contemporary language art in a global community that is increasingly defined by multiple, intersecting, and competing networks. Panelists will ask: what future citizenship(s) do multilingual literatures enable? How do we imagine a non-English poetics that resists translation? What dynamics between majority and minority language networks are enacted in and enabled by translation, performance, pedagogy, and activism? Related areas of interest include the gaps between networks, where literature, performance, and translations are rendered illegible or are forced to mutate according to the specific requirements of a network to reveal—or conceal—possibilities of interpretation. Bringing together editors, publishers, writers, and scholars, who will discuss their own writing, perform excerpts, and/or discuss creators, networks, and systems, this panel offers a diversity of perspectives that will trouble the points of convergence between multilingual networks.