Struggles For Discursive Authority in Hungarian Politics: The Ideological Work of Translation, a talk by Susan Gal

Please join the Center for Global Ethnography for “Struggles For Discursive Authority in Hungarian Politics: The Ideological Work of Translation,” a talk by Susan Gal, (The University of Chicago).

Fri, May 27th
3:30PM to 5:00PM (PDT)
Location: Zoom

☞ RSVP HERE.

Abstract:  Despite the ubiquity of “translation” as a metaphor in anthropology, literary translation has only rarely been the object of ethnographic interest. Yet it is arguably a central site of political hierarchy in a global context. This talk explores two genres of translation to track their circulation and strategies of gaining authority. What ideas about language, register, value and nation are presupposed in each?  One is the unlikely case of a beloved children’s book; the other is a government minister’s embrace of anti-gender discourse. I argue that, when juxtaposed, they reveal different aspects of the semiotic process that creates political polarization.

Bio: Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics. Her latest book, with Judith T. Irvine, is Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, which won the 2021 Sapir Prize of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. She is also the author of Language Shift, and co-author of The Politics of Gender after Socialism. In numerous articles, and as co-editor of Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority, she has written about the political economy of language, especially in eastern Europe. Most recently, she has focused on the semiotic processes that mediate translation and the discourses of the European far-right.

For any questions about the event, please contact David Stentiford, ds1 [at] stanford.edu (ds1[at]stanford[dot]edu).