Translocations: The Irish Migration

CALL FOR PAPERS
Translocations: The Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review

Volume 3/ Issue 1/ 2008          www.translocations.ie

Since the mid-1990s, Ireland has experienced, probably for the first time in its modern history, economic prosperity, labour shortages and net inward migration. These developments have brought together debate and research covering a number of related areas. While not entirely new, these areas include the changing nature of ‘Irish’ identity and the explicit dialectical radicalization of ‘Irishness’ and ‘otherness’. The result has been an explosion of public and academic debates on the question of social changes due to large-scale immigration and integration policies. Translocations is a peer-review journal which aims to map out these themes and construct a dynamic network of those academics and policy makers who are interested in contributing to these intersecting debates within the specificity of the Irish context.

Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum

MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA MUSIC FORUM
Friday November 9th, 2007
Room N336, Senate House, University of London

PROGRAMME
Registration from 9.15am
9.45am – Welcome
Session 1: 10 – 11.45am  Owen Wright (SOAS) The Ikhwan al-Safa’ on Rhythm
Sam Mirelman (SOAS) ‘Music Theory’ Texts from the Ancient Near East
11.45am – tea/coffee
Session 2: 12.15 – 1pm  Ruth Davis (University of Cambridge) Portraying
the East in Mandatory Palestine: Jewish Nationalism and ‘Oriental Music’.
1pm – Lunch
Session 3:  2.30 – 4.15pm   Martin Stokes (University of Oxford) The
Melancholic Cosmopolitanism of Müslüm Gürses
Tony Langlois (University College, Cork) Constructing the Sacred and
Ethnic in North African Music Festivals
4.15 – 5.15pm tea/coffee and final discussion session
5.30 – 6.30pm   Concert featuring Palestinian singer Reem Kelani

The Middle East and Central Asia Music forum is open to researchers,
students and anyone interested in the music and culture of the region. In
the spirit of fostering dialogue and interdiscplinarity, we hope that the
issues discussed at the forum will be of interest to a broad audience,
including musicologists, ethnomusicologists and other researchers in the
arts, humanities and social sciences. In addition, we welcome those
working on other aspects of Middle Eastern and Central Asian culture
broadly speaking (dance, visual arts, media, film, literature, etc.)

Advance booking is requested via Valerie James at music@sas.ac.uk; there
will be a nominal charge of £5 to include tea and coffee. Attendance for
students is free.

East-West Migration in the EU

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EU MONITORING AND ADVOCACY PROGRAM
OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE
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16 OCTOBER 2007

NEW EUMAP CALL FOR PAPERS: “Across Fading Borders: The Challenges of East-West Migration in the EU”

EUMAP calls for articles about the impact and background of intra-EU mobility and migration, both in the countries of destination and the countries of origin.
Read the full Call for Papers at
http://www.eumap.org/journal/announcements/cfp_oct07.pdf

THEMES AND QUESTIONS
EUMAP would especially welcome contributions on one of the following themes:

• Policy responses to East-European migration in the countries of destination.
• East-European migration and the multicultural society.
• Immigration from the new Member States in comparison.
• The impact of emigration on the countries of origin.
• The Central European Member States as immigration countries.

Foreign Workers and Students in the GDR – New Blog

A new blog about Foreign Workers and Students in the GDR was launched recently and is run by Dr Damian Mac Con Uladh, an expert in this important field of migration history and studies. Damian hopes that:

 this blog will allow me to draw together the hundreds of book reports, media articles, television documentaries on the subject. Moreover, I hope that it will enable foreign graduates of East German universities as well as former contract workers to contact me and each other, offering them a forum to relate their own experiences should they wish.

Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe

International Conference to be held at
the University of Copenhagen
8-10 November 2007

Literature by migrants – those not at home where they write – foregrounds many questions concerning cultural and linguistic identity, not least the relationships between identity, language and territory. Fundamentally, such literature challenges the categories according to which literary disciplines have traditionally (that is, since the late nineteenth century) organised their research.

This conference on “Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe” aims to bring together scholars researching within this field and to establish or negotiate the sense of a shared discipline with common paradigms and problematics.

See more information about the conference programme and registration at http://migrationandliterature.engerom.ku.dk/

Literature of Migration: The Italian case

Dr. Federica Mazzara is Post-Doctoral Mellon Fellow at University College London (UCL). The topic of the Mellon Programme for the next two years is “Translations/Transpositions -migration and non-mother-tongue writing”.

Here’s a brief outline of Federica’s project which is focused on the Italian case of the literature of migration. Federica welcomes comments and feedback on this work, as well as ideas about similar projects and relevant themes. 
You can find more information about the UCL Mellon Programme and Federica’s work at:
www.ucl.ac.uk/mellon-program/fellows/federica

‘Italophone Literature of Migration and Auto-translation: A New Avant-garde in a World Literature Perspective’
Dr. Federica Mazzara

Literature of Migration in Italy is a general label that denotes a group of very diverse writers, who only share the choice of writing in Italian – a foreign language for them – as the idiom for literary expression. They have all adopted the Italian language and relate to it in multiple ways according to their personal experiences of migration and their attitudes toward the culture of the “host” country.
By focusing on the case of Italophone immigrant writing emerging over the past two decades, this project will investigate the challenge on three levels. Firstly, through an exploration of writers whose trans-cultural itineraries and personal backgrounds are very diverse, the contours of a contemporary Italophone literary field will be drawn with respect to the “internal translation” each writer engages in his or her writings, their discursive and linguistic explorations of bilingualism, and the literary forms they employ to negotiate the migration experience (notably, but not exclusively, autobiography). Secondly, the project will determine the specific dynamics within the Italian cultural, linguistic and literary landscape which condition but is also itself modified by the emergence of these immigrant voices. Thirdly, the project engages the reception and recent theorization of Italophone migrant literature in the light of available critical discourses predominantly based on British and French examples and cultural histories. The project discusses to what extent a local case, such as the one investigated here, can be described and theorized fully by reference to “global” academic discourses deriving from Anglo-American cultural studies and post-colonial theory, or whether local conditions call for local considerations.
In an attempt to bridge the gap between critical insistence on local diversity and the more globalised cultural studies discourse, this project aims at finding a middle way in order to investigate both the circulation of migrant literature in Italy and its reception and theorisation. Here the recent interest within comparative literature studies in “World Literature” (in effect Goethe’s old concept of Weltliterature), offers a perspective that has already proven productive for translation studies. One basic assumption of a World Literature perspective is that literary “works gain in translation” (Damrosch, 2003). This perspective is found to be especially productive for this project, since it offers a framework with which to approach literature and its various modes of circulation and transaction across borders (Casanova, 1999), its trans-national genres (Moretti, 2000) and its in-betweenness.

New Book/DVD-ROM Project: Transcultural Documentary Practice

Projecting Migration – Transcultural Documentary Practice
Edited by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien

Migration is one of the major political issues of the current era and increasingly determines who we are and how we define ourselves. Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice is a groundbreaking book/DVD-ROM project that explores migration in locations as varied as Lebanon, Ireland, South Africa and the US/Mexico border. Through its diverse collection of essays, films, photography and audio recordings, the project offers a dynamic, fresh approach. Each essay is cross-referenced with DVD chapters of original footage to provide unique practical examples of ethnographic filmmaking, as well as perspectives on the subject not usually portrayed in the media.