Teresa Villa-Ignacio’s paper, “Khaïr-Eddine, Aspirational Translation, and the Cruel Optimism of Decolonial Poetics,” considers the translations into English of the work of award-winning Indigenous Francophone Moroccan writer Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941-1995) by U.S. American poet-translators Jake Syersak and Conor Bracken. Villa-Ignacio argues that these translations prioritize Khaïr-Eddine’s democratic poetics through what Mona Baker calls “aspirational translation” (2020), which is symptomatic of a target culture unable to imagine a democratic future. This paper claims that the rise of fascism in western countries, and the United States in particular, motivates the poetic and editorial urgencies of these translations. Such motivations highlight the quandaries, following Berlant, of the cruel optimism of decolonial translation within an asymmetrical global framework.

Whitney DeVos’s talk, “Pluriversal Translation: World(s)-building Across Cognitive Territories Under Late Fascism,” examines poetic translation as intercultural resistance amid what Alberto Toscano terms “late fascism.” It focuses on Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil’s 2017 translation of a 1992 poem by Mahmoud Darwish, itself based on a speech attributed to Duwamish Chief Seattle. This paper traces the construction and relay of this multilayered text: from Lushootseed to Chinook to English to Palestinian Arabic and, from there, into Spanish and Ayuujk. Along the way, DeVos theorizes “pluriversal translation” as a world(s)-building practice that mobilizes insurgent epistemologies to forge solidarities across stateless territories, collectively imagining autonomous futures beyond fascist, extractivist, and nationalist regimes.

Margaret Ronda’s talk, “Rot and Red Sky: Anti-Fascist Poetics of Oceania,” examines two recent collections of poems by Indigenous poets from Oceania, Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura and Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot, which connect local forms of anti-colonial struggle to the broader horizons of fascist resurgence and anti-fascist resistance across the globe. These collections consider the Indigenous histories and language traditions of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand as vital heritages for contemporary resistance movements and consider the politics of translation as immanent formal strategy and urgent source of inquiry within the poems. For both these poets, a key point of inquiry is the entangled interface between ecological crisis, gendered and racialized experience, extractive colonialism and fascist cultures, and they draw on ancestral story and contemporary language practices to offer alternative accounts.

Jennifer Scappettone’s talk, “Harmonics of Disbelonging: ‘Clamored’ Song Against Tyranny,” returns to anti-fascist poetics of the early twentieth century to re-examine the age-old tensions between grounded collective action and the anti-fascist tactics of the avant-garde, sounding their potential resonance with resistance movements of today. Setting Italian-born “Wobbly” poet/activist Arturo Giovannitti’s eccentric, yet identifiably socialist internationalism apprehensible in “Ode to the Tyrant” and “The Cage” against the more carnal, ludic, syllabically instigated rejection of tribalism that emerges in the lyrics of an everywhere exiled Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and in her long, largely unpublished correspondence with Djuna Barnes, the paper asks how these divergent idioms against tyranny, from the anthemic to the audaciously opaque, the movement-driven to the necessarily private, may resonate in a contemporary context of algorithmically driven information and AI-led transparency where public hunger for expressions of truth to power is indisputable, yet anatomies of collectivity and difficulty are themselves endangered species.