“Recalibrating Afrikanistik” (RecAf) invites advanced Bachelor students and Master students of the European partner universities to join us for five days of experiencing translation in Procida. There will be lectures, seminars, workshops and readings, as well as discussion sessions and a roundtable centred on the potential of un/translatability.

In this summer school we engage in conversations about experiencing translation in African Studies. On the one hand, we centre our own lived experiences of translation, and on the other hand, we create discussion spaces about how translation is conceptualised in different areas of African Studies. Amongst many more these include Linguistics, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Southern Theory. Together we want to get in touch with the feeling, the trouble and the potential of translation and untranslatability that co-constitute our everyday, but also our scholarly and artistic experiences. Because translation occurs in various environments, we introduce some possible settings in which we are confronted with translation: Verbal art (written and oral), classroom settings and ethnographic and/or linguistic fieldwork. The framework of translation we are exploring together, is about transcending boundaries, creating relatability and understanding between ourselves but also our different knowledge-making practices. We therefore also open translation up beyond the textual and linguistic sphere, thinking for example about how objects are translated in the context of restitution debates or about how bodies are translated in different spaces and situations.

Deadline for application: 15 April 2024