"Eileen Chang, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Politics of Cold War Translation."

Speaker(s): Mai Wang (PhD candidate, English)

Here's what Mai has to say about her work: 

In 1953, the United States Information Agency was established by the Eisenhower administration to promote anti-Communism in East Asia. The USIA hired Eileen Chang, a renowned Chinese writer living in exile in Hong Kong, to translate canonical American literature and write two novels. The first chapter of my dissertation examines Chang's career as a USIA employee and how she attempted to circumvent the ideological guidelines of the federal agency. I perform a close reading of Chang's translations of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetry alongside her novel Naked Earth to argue that both writers strove to articulate a poetics of nonalignment.