Visiting professor Erin J. Kappeler (Tulane University) will be speaking in Hill Auditorium in Barrows Hall on Wednesday, March 4, at 3PM.
Kappeler will explore key texts by the modernist poet and activist Mary Austin, who helped to invent Native American poetry as a field, to show that the concept of free verse was a tool of settler cultural domination as much as it was a democratization of poetic language or a formal innovation. This history of free verse translations of Native American oral expressions opens pressing questions about the ethics of translation and about legacies of settler colonial appropriations of Native American cultural materials in contemporary English departments.
Part of the McGillicuddy Humanities Center’s symposium on “Society, Colonization, and Decolonization.” The event is free and open to the public.