Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In my paper, I propose to read translation as a relocating act: of people, of meanings, of texts. Relocation is a “keyword” of today’s global culture, used to refer to the redistribution of migrants after they have crossed the border into new states, but relocation also refers to the constant cultural and linguistic adjustments that people who are moving from one form of belonging to another know at first hand. The study of translation, through the lens of migration, I argue, allows us to close the gap that often opens between our experience of the world and how we learn and teach that experience in our schools and universities. My reading of translation as a relocation of culture pays homage to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, which provided a whole generation of scholars in the 1990s with the vocabulary to talk about postcolonial and transnational cultural phenomena, but uses translation as its compass, as a lens on the contemporary global condition and as a mode of thinking and seeing the world, in an attempt to engage in the global humanities, that is to say, a humanities scholarship that is intentionally not just Eurocentric, not just Western, not just theoretical. I will refer to the work of contemporary artist Emily Jacir who has put translation at the center of her engaged creative practices to bring translation into a politically informed discussion about cultural relations and humanistic knowledge.