Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper takes as its springboard the invisibility of globalization’s new slaves in contemporary Britain, as studied in my recent monograph, “New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp.” The trafficking and enslavement of migrants in contemporary Britain is a phenomenon that has grown, since the early 1990s, to massive proportions, involving economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Literature frequently describes these “new slaves” as living a hidden, isolated, invisible existence; hence, these migrants are often depicted using the trope of the ghost. I intend to investigate the implications of the invisibility of these new slaves in the field of literary translation. In other words, may translating strategies be considered as a means of countering the process through which these migrants are rendered invisible? How can translating strategies, on the other hand, end up replicating their spectralization? How do translation strategies work to preserve the identity and agency of these migrants and to emphasise the counter-narrative strain of the stories concerning them, thus offering a contribution to the decolonization of knowledge? Generally speaking, translating strategies leaning towards foreignization or domestication might have important implications as far as the safeguard of these new slaves’ identities is concerned, if one refers to Postcolonial Translation Theory and its focus on the issues of power imbalance involved in translation acts (Bassnett and Trivedi, Cavagnoli, Inghilleri, Robinson). In addition, more specific case-studies from translation practice are worth examining, possibly including pragmatic situations where translators work with underprivileged subjects.