The post- conundrum is beginning to condemn to repetition the fields of translation, literary interpretation and, to use a conveniently all-encompassing term, cultural interaction. The conundrum applies to the many theoretical positions in post- debate (e.g. orientalism, hybridity, domestication v foreignisation): grand narratives may perpetuate dominant power and explanatory paradigms; their ‘deconstruction’ to the local archive, however, may perpetuate division in the rivalry of communities, regions, even nations. To transpose the conundrum to translation studies: translation emanating from the centre may do violence to the peripheral source-culture; but the demise of the translation activity – were a demise practically possible – would limit the crossing of borders in an increasingly mobile world.

The panel does not wish to rehash a conundrum which, despite ever-sophisticated interrogations of spaces inbetween, is in danger of sounding solipsistic. Accordingly, papers are not invited on the formula, ‘according to Foucault, Derrida, Bhabha, Venuti, etc, I shall illustrate...’. Instead, papers are invited that articulate, explore, or qualify new possibilities beyond the post- conundrum.

What are the important questions, issues, of transfer, translation, transformation in a globalising, or should it be a glocalising, world? For despite the CNN version of the global reach, Israeli literature today surely cannot escape Palestinian intrusion, and vice versa, just as the early Xhosa bard Ntsikana and the 1820 settler Thomas Pringle, in what is now South Africa, spoke and wrote across each other’s worlds. In the US we hear that minority voices are closing the American mind, and many minorities (perhaps a combined majority) already identify a closure in the monocultural, neo-liberal mind that did not perceive heterogeneity behind the homogenising fiction of the ‘Iraqi people’. Is the former eastern Europe the latest adjunct to the West (what is the West when the French football team’s success relies on migration from a colonial past’)? Or is the former eastern Europe a new member of the South periphery club? Are some peripheries more significant than others, or Others? Or, indeed, have global and local interactions, encounters, not always modified one another’s presencing?

How then to communicate across worlds while valuing the epistemological integrity of the different cultures between which the communication takes place. What is the contribution of the translator, the interpreter, the interculturalist, however we define the terms?

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