Writing Back in/and Translation

In formal postcolonial jargon, writing back signifies an interplay where one cultural practice – commonly called the Western – is being modified, resisted or abandoned to give room for alternative modes of expression and creation. In its post-90 development towards the cultural turn, translation studies has conversely become occupied with ideological concerns. Who translates, and who / what is being (re-)translated? Where is the power? The metonymics of translation, the «wandering» process informing all cultural change, postulates the operation of different agencies (i.e., the writer as translator, the translator as writer) and different geophysical, ideological and cultural levels of representation (i.e., the migratory text as a mediation of both the local and the foreign). The book examines the specific historical, social and political hegemonic patterns of postcolonial translation in interdisciplinary fields. It explores translation as a dynamic site of ambivalences in its location and re-location of new centres and peripheries. The writers come from a variety of academic areas: history of ideas, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies. They include Robert Young (Oxford), Christiane Fioupou (Toulouse), Ovidi Carbonell i Cortés (Salamanca), Stephanos Stepanides (Cyprus), Sebnem Susam-Sarajeva (Edinburgh), Lars-Håkan Svensson (Linköping), and Christina Gullin (Kristianstad).