JoSTrans 43 (January 2025): Special Issue on Translation, Representation and Performance

Guest Editors
Lisha Xu (Beijing Jiaotong University) and David Johnston (Queen’s University Belfast)

This special edition of JoSTrans looks at the issues involved in translating plays for
performance on a contemporary stage where practitioners and audiences alike are
increasingly sensitised to the representation of race, identity, gender, and sexuality. The
Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have, in particular, coalesced around wider
social justice movements that have further galvanised, and in many ways drawn together,
different sets of identitarian politics. At the heart of these politics, identity works in terms of
promoting the recognition of difference, both of opportunity and of participatory parity,
operating as a category of perception that acts as a heuristic springboard towards what
Linda Hamilton Krieger described over twenty-five years ago as “strategies for simplifying
the perceptual environment and acting on less-than-perfect information” (1995, 1161). For
some, this leads inevitably to the honing of critical theories of race and gender, and their
extension into the worldview of rapidly growing numbers of people. For others, we are
witnessing a maximalist politics which, in its tracing of its own history through different
sources of resistance across time and space, is increasingly impatient with any expression of
what are perceived as oppressive positions, irrespective of the timeframe in which such
positions were taken.

It is evident that we are living through a time of paradigm shift in terms of our relationships
both with each other as identity types and with the assumptions and dynamics of our past.
Whether we think of these shifts as undergirded by processes of recouping or erasure, they
enshrine attitudes and responses that have radically changed the terrain of the arts in
general, and of the representational arts in particular. Moreover, their impact on new
generations of trainee performers means that such changes in the specialised field of
theatre and performance are undoubtedly long-term.
This special issue asks what this might mean for contemporary translation for performance.
Translation for the stage is obviously a key concern here, but other modes and aspects of
preparing for and experiencing performance might also be considered – surtitling,
streaming, moving image, stand-up comedy, etc . We invite abstracts addressing either one
or more of the following questions, or picking up on any related concern:

• What are the implications for translators working with texts from different places
and, particularly, different times, where radically different conceptions of gender
and other perceived markers of identity are in operation?
• What is the relationship between translation for performance and re-historicising
practice?
• To what extent might translated plays or other dramatic forms be able – or still be
able - to offer a counter-current where mutually incompatible or contestatory
positions can be put forward simultaneously?
• What are the implications for the space in which translation takes place if we regard
the assumptions of the receiving context as hardened into critical positions?
• Is what we might think of as the more traditionally civic nature of the performance
event changing to accommodate a more critical environment, and if so what might
this mean in terms of the texts/performances we choose to translate?
• To what extent does the elimination of cultural appropriation fall to the translator?
Can such charges be obviated through solely production-based decisions, such as
blind casting etc?
• Can translations be used to challenge or confirm conceptions of what might be
thought of as the ‘politically correct’?
• Does the awareness of such political correctness on the part of the translator for
performance imply a necessary process of accommodation or can it drift into selfcensorship? Is there a readily discernible divide here?

Deadline for submission of proposals: 1 June 2023

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