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RETHINKING TRANSLATION
SPEAKER: Jennifer Nelson, Hilles Bush Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Associate Professor Department of Art History University of Delaware
Memes, among other things, are an efficient technology for the construction of the past and a model for historical or trans-temporal translation. Memes seem current: they overtly advertise the ephemerality of their motifs and the fungibility of their textual components. Nevertheless, this talk makes the case that memes possess a liberatory pastness based on faith in collective cultural exchange and production. A comparison of memes with emblems, another form of circulating text-image hybrid that arose amid a revolution in media accessibility, shows how both formats translate fragments or "details" of previous articulations into a new lexicon of meaning--thus positing a shared past. Yet memes, unlike emblems rooted in a transcendent antiquity, treat living users as co-creative agents of their communicative format. Alongside other harm-reproducing forms of pastness typical of popular culture of the last two decades, memes offer a form of liberation through an ongoingly translatable past invoked for present purpose.
About the Speaker
Jennifer Nelson is an art historian and poet whose publications include Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019) as well as three books of poetry: Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (2015), Civilization Makes Me Lonely (2017) and Harm Eden (2021).
Previously supported by the Clark Art Institute, a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded summer institute in cartography at the Newberry Library, the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Nelson holds degrees from Yale University, New York University, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Harvard College.