The 54th PhD Academic Salon of Translation Studies, 25 Nov.

TEJASWINI NIRANJANA is presently a Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India, and DistinguishedAdjunct Professor of Humanities, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has an MA in English and Aesthetics (1981) from the University of Bombay, an MPhil in Linguistics (1982) from the University of Pune, and a PhD (1988) from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her publications include the recent Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006) and Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992). She has co-edited Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Kolkata, 1993). In addition to her academic work, Tejaswini heads the Higher Education Cell at CSCS, with the mandate of creating, fundraising for, and implementing programmes for the positive transformation of the higher education sector in India.


About the Lecture

FEMINISM AND TRANSLATION
Understanding Contemporary Social Movements in India

After long and repetitive discussions about ‘faithfulness’ and ‘betrayal’, some scholars in inter-disciplinary humanities have begun to think about translation in rather different ways. The theorizing of translation in the colonial context in the 1990s opened up new questions about language and power, inequality and representation. Critiques are now available of both humanistic and ethnographic ideas of translation, which are based on grasping literary value or cultural value through a universalist lens. Such critiques have helped open up the realm of linguistic translation to questions of the political, drawing attention to the myriad asymmetries structuring all acts of translation.

In this talk I will argue that we need to reposition translation as a continuous looping between languages. This is especially relevant when discussing contemporary movements such as feminism in non-western contexts. I will give examples from Indian feminism and suggest what goes into the making of the feminist subject in India. I argue that introducing the notion of translation into this field will help us better understand the conceptual and social terrain on which feminism is growing.


All welcome!