This talk compares two Bangladeshi poets—Shamshur Rahman and Tarfia Faizullah—on the shared feature that both use foreign materials in foreign tongues to speak about the legacies of the Liberation War and about national history. Despite composing in different languages (Bengali and English), in different decades (1970s and 2010s), and from different locations (Dhaka and Texas), the intertextual and intercultural translations in their works exude a kind of ethical richness with transnational resonance.
Speaker: Supurna Dasgupta
Assistant Professor of English, Santa Clara University
Supurna Dasgupta teaches South Asian literature, world literatures, gender and sexuality, global aesthetics, and first‑year writing. She is currently working on her monograph Intimate Revolutions: Gender and Counterculture in the Postcolony, which examines the global 1960s in South Asia.
Co‑Sponsors
South Asian Studies Program
RU Libraries
Program in Comparative Literature
Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative
Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures