| This dissertation focusses on the place of "translation" in contemporary literary theory, philosophy, historiography, and ethnography. My concern is to discuss the political as well as the linguistic aspects of translation, and to show how translation, overdetermined by violence, law, and subjugation, becomes a strategy of containment in the colonial context. The violence accompanying the constitution of Otherness is rendered invisible by the classical philosophemes of reality and representation that both underlie and are reinforced by the practice of translation in the power-laden context of colonialism.; Chapter I situates the problematic of translation in present-day literary theory and philosophy. Through a series of readings, I explore the construction of the colonial subject in different colonial "translators", arguing that translation is bound up with history-writing, and that the post-structuralist critique of "history" undermines the project of translation-as-subjectification. I suggest that notions of translation as displacement and history as "effective-history" or historicity (history still working in the present) can explain the conjunctures of past and present in post-colonial space.; Chapter II examines the place of translation in traditional translation studies and ethnographic writing. These two discourses, caught in the idiom of fidelity-versus-betrayal and an unproblematized concept of representation, cannot account for the historicity of translation, although ethnography, inspired by developments in literary theory, has begun to question the asymmetries of translation in cross-cultural representation.; In Chapters III through V, I focus on the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, all of whom have initiated, explicitly or implicitly, critiques of representation and historicism associated with the "figure" of translation. My analysis of de Man's and Derrida's readings of Benjamin indicates that they do not account for the troping of translation into history-writing in the latter's work, a troping, I argue in Chapter VI, that is significant for post-colonial translation. Using a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, I show how the re-thinking of translation as un-nostalgic and non-essentialist makes translating a strategy of resistance rather than one of containment. |
