Talk Session “Wandering in-between: Gender, Culture, and Politics”/ YOMU: Literary Exchange and Dialogue

This event now concluded. Event transcript available here.

The Japan Foundation（JF) will hold a talk session titled “Wandering in-between: Gender, Culture, and Politics,” on Friday, December 8, 2023, featuring Indonesian Author Intan Paramaditha; Kristen Alfaro, Publisher of Tilted Axis Press in the UK; and OGAWA Kimiyo, Professor at Sophia University. The session is organized under the YOMU project, which aims to promote understanding of diverse cultures and values through literary dialogue, together with the forming and expanding of networks of those concerned.

文芸対話プロジェクト“YOMU”　トークセッション「文学におけるジェンダー、文化、政治の交差するところ」12/8 15:00-17:00

We are living in a world of overlapping systems of privilege and oppression that arise from nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other factors. Stories and narratives that reach us are often determined by these conditions, which have cast a shadow over the diversity of literary spaces and knowledge production. This may also be closely related to the question of how we understand the "others." In this dialogue, Intan Paramaditha, a feminist author who questions the unequal distribution of power and knowledge, Kristen Alfaro, a publisher who brings diverse voices through translations of Asian literature, and Ogawa Kimiyo, who has extensively written on “ethics of care” and literature, all delve into various issues that emerge at the intersection of gender, culture, and politics.How do literature and publishing address and respond to those issues? What wisdom can they offer in listening to diverse voices and the imaging of otherness?

Outline

Session title	Wandering in-between: Gender, Culture, and Politics
Date：	Friday, December 8, 2023
Time：	3 p.m. – 5 p.m. (Doors open at 2:30 p.m.)
Venue：	The International House of Japan Lecture Hall
Language：	English and Japanese（simultaneous interpretation available）
Admission：	Free (registration required) / 80 seats
Registration：	https://jp.surveymonkey.com/r/97QQSBN *(2023/12/1 10:00) Pre-registration is closed.
Organizer：	The Japan Foundation

Profile of Panelists

Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha is an author and an academic. Her books The Wandering and Apple and Knife were translated from the Indonesian into English by Stephen J. Epstein and published by Harvill Secker, Penguin Random House, UK. Her works have received awards in Indonesia, such as the Tempo Best Literary Fiction, as well as the PEN Translation Prize from the English PEN. In 2021 she was long-listed for the Stella Prize in Australia and selected for the Best American Travel Writing. This year she published her new novel, Malam Seribu Jahanam (2023), a feminist gothic novel weaving Islamic stories and Southeast Asian folktales. She received a Ph.D. from New York University and is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is currently a writer in residence at the Asia Creative Writing Programme, Nanyang Technological University Singapore. In 2022, she contributed an essay. to the YOMU project.

Kristen Vida Alfaro

Kristen Vida Alfaro is Publisher of Tilted Axis Press. Prior to her work in publishing, she led labour and anti-racist organizing at the Barbican and has written about the history of artist film and video in New York City. This work informs how she leads the next stage of the press, which will see Tilted Axis develop interdisciplinary projects alongside publishing contemporary and historical literature in translation. In her time at Tilted Axis, she has co-organized the 2023 Southeast Asian Literary Forum and continues to develop coalition building projects with partners across Asia and Africa.

Photo by Rana Shimada

Ogawa Kimiyo (Moderator)

Ogawa Kimiyo is Professor at Sophia University, Japan. She is interested in how advances in medical and physiological science informed representations of mind and human behaviour in a range of eighteenth-century Gothic novels. Recently she has been writing extensively on the "ethic of care" in literature (Recovering Care in World Literature, The Ethic of Care and Empowerment, The Planet that Cares). She is the editor of Johnson in Japan (Bucknell University Press) with Mika Suzuki, and also the upcoming volume, Austen and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan), with Tristanne Connolly. She has translated Airswimming by Charlotte Jones. In 2022, she co-hosted Asia and the Regency of Jane Austen ＆ Co., with Inger Brody and Anne Fertig.

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