The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University hosts the inaugural event for the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar in Global Language Justice 2017-2019.

Will the plurality of poetic speech and the diversity of human languages be faded and become obsolete in the not so distant future? If poetry, as language that lends itself to memorization and recitation, arises from the lived worlds of song and ritual incantation, what would happen to human societies when we could no longer sing the song or form emotional attachment to the rich traditions embodied by the plurality of poetic speech around the world?

Readings by: Bei Dao, Mohammed Bennis, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Sharmistha Mohanty, Daouda Ndiaye, Anne Waldman, Orlando White, Zhai Yongming, and Raúl Zurita.