Translating the Field: Music, Power, Praxis

Susan Thomas (The University of Texas at Austin)
Nancy Yunhwa Rao (Rutgers University)
Michael Iyanaga (College of William and Mary)

Translating the Field explores the multilingual intersections of music, sound, performance, and ethnography. An area often ignored in disciplinary critique, theoretical stances, and methodological training, translation plays a continual—if often unexamined—role in our research, our relationship with the communities with which we collaborate, and the publication and reception of our work.

This symposium addresses this lacuna by engaging translation as a complex process that risks altering, deforming, or distorting the living cultures, artistic products, and textual histories that we study. We thus take translation seriously, not only in calling attention to the often invisibilized process of its creation and the methodologies wrapped up in it, but also in questioning why we translate at all and what the potential ramifications of our translations might be.
 

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