The Critical South Asia Group and the Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development would like to invite all Arts Faculty colleagues to their 2022-2023 Annual Lecture. Please register through the link below.

“Or It was Time Playing upon Time”: Translation and the Indian Nation 

by Dr Sadia Abbas 

 Date: Tuesday 7 March 2023, 17:00-18:30

Location: Ramphal Building R1.15, University of Warwick (in-person)

Register: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/wicid/news/registrationform/Link opens in a new window 

Registration is open to everyone for free. 

The event will be followed by a reception with refreshments. 

Abstract: The lecture will focus on the writer Qurutulain Hyder’s engagement with Neoclassicism, colonial and nationalist archaeology, and the global history of the picturesque in her two Urdu novels Akhir-i-Shab ke Humsafar and Aag ka Darya, which she substantially rewrote in her own English translations Fireflies in the Mist and River of Fire. Framed through a discussion of translation and “transcreation”, the lecture will read Hyder’s ekphrastic treatments of ruins, statues, and frescoes as a critique of teleology and nationalist and Hindutva historiography, while also addressing the contradictions of ostensibly cosmopolitan Europe and the nationalist postcolonial state.