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Translation and the Construction of Identity

Special Panel: Translation and the
(De-)construction of National/Cultural Identities

Chaired by Sameh Fekry, Rita Kothari and Carol Maier

This panel seeks to explore the relation between translation, as both an act and metaphor, and all the discourses on the cultural other, and the implications this relation has for the notion of national identity.

It goes without saying that the discourse of orientalism, in its endeavour to construct its own narrative of the orient, found in translation a convenient mechanism for encoding an oriental other in a way that serves its own colonialist prospects; this orientalist encoding exoticized the other, yet did not grant it the status of a nation(nations), and hence denied it, mainly through translation, any unique national/cultural identity. The concept of a nation has always been thought of as worthy only of Western subjects. However, the rise of post-colonialism marked an attempt at deconstructing the colonialist narrative through putting forward another alternative narrative that delineates and rather foregrounds the unique national cultural identity(ies)of the ex-colonized countries. Translation played no less a part in formulating this alternative narrative. However, the polarized politics of both the discourses of colonialism and post-colonialism has been lately critiqued by discourses that question the very dichotomy of self and other, and opt instead for a third space that blurs the rigid boundaries of national/cultural identities; for these discourses the category of 'transnational' is much more valid than that of the 'national'. Hence, this panel covers the following range of topics:

Abstracts to be sent to any of the three organizers: