The Relocation of Culture

Literatures, Cultures, Translation

Literatures, Cultures, Translation presents books that engage central

issues in translation studies such as history, politics, and gender
in and of literary translation, as well as books that open new
avenues for study. Volumes in the series follow two main strands of
inquiry: one strand brings a wider context to translation through
an interdisciplinary interrogation, while the other hones in on the
history and politics of the translation of seminal works in literary and
intellectual history.

Series Editors
Brian James Baer, Kent State University, USA
Michelle Woods, The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA

Editorial Board
Paul Bandia, Concordia University, Canada, and Harvard University, USA
Susan Bassnett, Warwick University, UK
Leo Tak-hung Chan, Guangxi University, Hong Kong, China
Michael Cronin, Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland
Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Carol Maier, Kent State University, USA
Denise Merkle, Moncton University, Canada
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria

Volumes in the Series

Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature by Brian James Baer
Interpreting in Nazi Concentration Camps edited by Michaela Wolf
Exorcising Translation: Towards an Intercivilizational Turn by Douglas Robinson
Literary Translation and the Making of Originals by Karen Emmerich
The Translator on Stage by Geraldine Brodie
Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address by Douglas Robinson
Western Theory in East Asian Contexts: Translation and
Translingual Writing by Leo Tak-hung Chan
The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary
Latin American Fiction by Heather Cleary
The Relocation of Culture: Translations, Migrations, Borders by
Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani
The Relocation of Culture
Translations, Migrations, Borders

Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani

Foreword by Homi K. Bhabha

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright © Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani, 2021

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xviii–xx constitute an extension

of this copyright page.

Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Cover photograph © Gaia De Luca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers
would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6522-5

PB: 978-1-5013-6521-8
ePDF: 978-1-5013-6524-9
eBook: 978-1-5013-6523-2

Series: Literatures, Cultures, Translation

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt Ltd.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
This is to our students, in both continents, because they helped us write this
book, without realizing it.
And to Antonietta, the lady and the tomboy, who did not see the end of this
work, but would have been very proud.
vi
 Contents

List of Figures ix
Foreword: Translation’s Foreign Relations Homi K. Bhabha x
Acknowledgments xviii

Introduction 1
0.1 The Location and Relocation of Culture 1
0.2 Disciplinary Border-Crossings 5
0.3 Translation as Migration 8
0.4 Migration as Translation 12
0.5 Two Authors, One Book 15

Part One Translation as Migration

1 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 21

1.1 Translation as Worldly Knowledge 21
1.2 Translation as Migration: A New Schema 23
1.3 A Mediterranean Via Crucis 28
1.4 Translating Right(s) at Entry Point 39

2 The Postcolonial Lesson 47

2.1 Translation, Migration, and Postcolonial Literature 47
2.2 The Accent in Postcolonial Writing 49
2.3 Born Creole: A Caribbean Vocabulary for Reading 51
2.4 Accented Reading 64

Part Two Migration as Translation

3 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 69

3.1 Mediterranean Blood Ties 69
3.2 Making Sense of the Unknown 72
3.3 The “Project of Unforgetting” 76
3.4 The Issue of Respect 81
viii Contents

4 The Gaze of Medusa 87

4.1 “I Don’t Want to Go to Europe” 87
4.2 Pics and Other Objects 92
4.3 Familiarizing/Defamiliarizing 100
4.4 Their Own Gaze 108

5 Melting Wor(l)ds 111

5.1 Translation on the Border/Translation as Bordering 111
5.2 Translation as the Relocation of Culture 115
5.3 Translation Literacy and Global Citizenship 120

References 122
Index 138
 Figures

0.1 The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www.

facebook.com/queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444
355356188583/?type=3&theater 12
1.1 Emily Jacir, Stazione, 2009. Proposal for public installation
located on line 1 Vaporetto stops (Digital Photographs)
Arsenale (2008–9) 29
1.2 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. I – ‫توملاب هيلع موكحم عوسي‬/
Jesus is condemned to death. Keys from Palestinian homes.
Nakba 33
1.3 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. II – ‫ىلع ةيبيلصلا لماح عوسي‬
‫ةيبكنم‬/Jesus carries his cross 34
1.4 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016. VII –‫تحت انه عقو عوسيلا‬
‫ةيناثلا ةرملل بيلصلا‬/Jesus fall the second time 35
1.5 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016, XIV. Il corpo di Gesù è deposto
nel sepolcro/Jesus is laid in the tomb 37
4.1 Mario Badagliacca, A Pakistani Man at Belgrade Waterfront,
Serbia, 2016. Ongoing project: The Game 93
4.2 Antonello da Messina, Annunciata di Palermo, 1475
(Galleria Regionale della Sicilia, Palermo) 94
4.3 Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei, 1640 102
4.4 Rohit Chawla, Portrait of Ai Weiwei, 2016. Project: Artists 103
4.5 Eduardo Salles, La memoria colectiva es de corto plazo, 2015 104
4.6 Anonymous Facebook post (October 2015) 104
5.1 Photograph of pages 80–1 of M. N. Philip’s Zong!, 2008 117
5.2 From Il Corriere della Sera, June 30, 2017, p. 6 118
 Foreword
Translation’s Foreign Relations
Homi K. Bhabha

The generous hospitality extended to my work by Simona Bertacco

and Nicoletta Vallorani in The Relocation of Culture is an honor and a
homecoming. It is an honor to have these engaged and innovative writers
pitch their tent adjacent to my texts and establish pathways and passages
that lead from one to the other and in diverse directions beyond. Hospitality
is not merely an invitation to reside in proximity; it is an obligation to
revise one’s ways of being, living, and thinking, side by side, in a spirit of
complementation, not completion, to use a concept that plays a crucial role
in Walter Benjamin’s remarkable reflections on translation. With this abiding
understanding of hospitality there comes an invitation to reenter an edifice
of one’s own making in a state of belatedness, as indigene and stranger, both
at once. To properly understand the significance of returning home, you have
to relearn the languages of domicile and domesticity, as they are rerouted
through the wayward and wandering vocabularies of displacement. Without
a translational “turn” it becomes difficult to evaluate what it means to locate
or relocate—whether you are returning or resettling—because translation is,
at once, a test of time and place.
Translation as a test of time and place? Yes, I want to take a small risk with
Walter Benjamin’s renowned work “The Task of the Translator” in this brief
foreword. The afterlife of Benjamin’s essay has been marked by a restless
slew of translations, revisions, and interpretations. Its enigmatic utterances
have been thoroughly mined, leaving no meaning unturned, no margin
redrawn. This excessive activity of translation, provoked by the most original
work on translation in our possession, is surely a tribute to the sublime
untranslatability of the essay itself. “Untranslatable,” Benjamin explains, “not
because meaning weighs on [translations] too heavily, but rather because
it attaches to them all too fleetingly” (Rendall 1997, 164). The translator’s
task is, indeed, fleeting and fragile. Fleeting because the translator catches
the reverberating echo of the original, not its resemblance. And fragile
 Foreword xi

because the translator works only with the fragments of the original—
be it “language” or “culture”—which can be repurposed and resignified
because fragments complement each other but they do not resemble one
another.
Accompanying the task of translation—listening for the reverberating
echo, crafting the fragmented vessel—is the test to which translation is
put. Embedded in the meaning of Aufgabe as task—“Aufgabe: a ‘task’ or
‘assignment’ or ‘school exercise’ … a ‘purpose’ or a ‘duty’ (giving yourself up to
a higher, trans-individual demand)”1—lies translation’s test. All assignments,
school exercises in particular, are tested; a purposeful activity must likewise
be tested to see if it lives up to its aspirations and duties. A translational test,
however, is not one that you pass or fail; it has nothing to do with philological
norms or pedagogical forms dedicated to making progress, or achieving an
end in sight: do better next time! follow the work more carefully! stay close to
the author’s intentions! Translation doesn’t pass the test of time by catching
up with language’s past or recalling the original. No, indeed, Benjamin
emphatically argues: “[A] translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed
from its life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ [Überleben]” (Rendall, 153).
The task of translation lies in its ability to test “this eternal continuing life of
the work” and to see if it lives up to the assignment of the afterlife. For the
fate and freedom of translation’s afterlife lies “in coming to terms with the
foreignness of languages to each other”:

But if languages grow in this way until they reach the messianic end
of their history, then it is translation that is ignited by the eternal
continuing life of the work and the endless revival of languages in
order to constantly test this sacred growth of languages, to determine
how distant what is hidden within them is from revelation, how close
it might become with knowledge of this distance … To say this is of
course to admit that translation is merely a preliminary way of coming
to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other. A dissolution of
this foreignness that would not be temporal and preliminary, but rather
instantaneous and final, remains out of human reach, or is at least not to
be sought directly.
(Rendall 157, emphasis added)

I will not venture to do what remains out of human reach. To pursue the
messianism of “pure language”—so frequently invoked in commentaries

1
As always, my gratitude to my colleague John Hamilton, my generous and illuminating
German philologist and literary guide.
xii Foreword

on this essay—is an aspiration too lofty for my temporal and preliminary

purposes. Nor does the modest scale of a foreword give me the space to
explore Benjamin’s intricate understanding of modes of intentionality that
haunt the elusive enunciations of languages, be they natural or national.
My selective argument explores what I will refer to as translation’s “foreign
relations”—translation as a secular project, a preliminary way of coming to
terms with the foreignness of languages.
The sacred is in no sense alien to the secular; the secular and the sacred
are “foreign” to each other, while coexisting in a translational condition
of growing kinship. The mission of secularism shares a common fate with
the task of translation: both are caught in the trade winds of historical
contingency and linguistic flux. The question is, how do we constantly
test the secular growth of languages in terms of their foreign relations?
Translation does not mirror another language or culture, which would
amount to no more than cultural appropriation and linguistic assimilation.
In negotiating language’s foreign relations, translation motivates a kinetic
movement between languages strange to each other, while setting the course
for a “tangential” form of kinship that is adjacent and affiliative rather than
mimetic and hierarchical:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this
touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which
it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches
the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense,
thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in
the freedom of linguistic flux.
Without explicitly naming or substantiating it, Rudolf Pannwitz has
characterized the true significance of this freedom …. “Our translations,
even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn
Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into
Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence
for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign
works …. The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in
which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language
to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.”
(Rendall, 163)

The test of translation—Aufgabe—is only partially met by the kinetic

convergence of the foreign relation—“a translation touches the original
lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense.” To pass the test,
translation’s “touch” must be intimate and intensive, although its expression
 Foreword xiii

hovers in a temporal realm of transition—“an incomplete form,” a seed

yet to sprout, a reality glimpsed only in linguistic life, as Benjamin makes
abundantly clear:

Thus translation ultimately has as its purpose the expression of the

most intimate relationships among languages. Translation cannot
possibly reveal or produce this hidden relationship; however, translation
can represent this relationship, insofar as it realizes it seminally or
intensively. In fact, this representation of the intended object by means
of an incomplete form or seed of its production is a very special mode of
representation seldom to be encountered in the domain of non-linguistic
life. For in analogies and signs non-linguistic life has types of reference
other than intensive, that is, anticipatory, intimating realization.—This
imagined, inner relationship among languages is, however, a relationship
of special convergence.
(Rendall, 154)

What counts as intimacy for language’s flourishing foreign relations? The

echo-play that ricochets through the essay is one “incomplete form” of
an intimate foreign relation: the translation echoes the original “at that
one point of sense” where languages touch, and from within the forest of
signification, the original language returns a reverberating echo (Rendall,
159). Echo calling to echo via echo. Another seed of intimacy is surely sown
in Benjamin’s seminal trope of the vessel of translation: fragile fragments
of a broken vessel need to touch each other tangentially, and at one point
only, because “in order to be fitted together, [they] must correspond to
each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other” (Rendall,
161). And again, we marvel at the chiasmatic intimacy by which German
is turned into Hindi, Greek, English, “powerfully affected by the foreign
tongue.” At these touching points foreign languages and cultures cross
each other’s paths of originality (not their national-linguistic “origins” or
identities) and the kinetic charge, which is at once intimate and intensive,
puts each language “powerfully in movement by the foreign language”
(Rendall, 163).
In what foreign direction does the powerful movement propel one’s own
language? What task awaits the translator when he returns to his language
from foreign parts? The more remote the time-travel, the more distant the
influence of foreign relations, the more urgent it becomes for the translator
to repair homeward:
xiv Foreword

[T]he fundamental error of the translator is that he holds fast to the state
in which his own language happens to be rather than allowing it to be
put powerfully in movement by the foreign language.
(Rendall, 163)2

Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his own,
he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate
to the point where work, image, and tone converge. He must expand and
deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally
realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can
be transformed, how language differs from language almost the way
dialect differs from dialect; however, this last is true only if one takes
language seriously enough, not if one takes it lightly.
(Zohn 2007, 81)

The translator returns to find that she is now a partial foreigner who has
reached a point of no return. To ensure the survival of the original language
and its cultural norms—and let us recall that “a translation proceeds from the
original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’
[Überleben]”—the translator cannot hold fast to the state in which her
language happens to be. Resisting the powerful movement of foreign relations
condemns language to still life, a living death. Protecting the sovereignty of
the national language and the identity of its cultural holism comes at the cost
of losing what is unique to linguistic life: the intimate experience of time in
transition and meaning in anticipation, relocated across territorial borders
and cultural borderlines in search of a kinship of foreign relations. Embodied
in the tangential “touches” of language’s foreign relations is a displacement
that is nonetheless decisive: fragments fitting together as vessels; tangents
lightly touching circles; echoes reverberating in the high forest of language;
German discovering its afterlife in Hindi. What are these translational
“touches” if not the ontology of language itself: tropes, metaphors, allegories,
translation? In the afterlife of language lies its power of secular prophecy that
retrieves a past that refuses to die and a future that will not wait to be born.
In between these intimations of figurative time, we survive the frailty and
freedom of history’s flux by means of the “incomplete forms” made present
to us in the domain of linguistic life, which lies “half-way between poetry
and doctrine” (Rendall, 160)—to cite Benjamin’s translation of Mallarmé’s
poetic invocation. Incomplete forms of linguistic life play a significant part

2
This quotation is a mash-up of Rendall’s and Zohn’s translations of Benjamin’s “The Task
of the Translator.”
 Foreword xv

in the making of historical meaning as history marks time in the present

moment. The afterlife of translation makes a salient appearance in Benjamin’s
Arcades Project, which owes its broken chronology to a mode of historical
understanding that “is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which
is understood” (Eiland and McLaughlin 1999, 460). The Arcades Project is the
epitome of an incomplete form, a vessel fabricated from archival fragments
that “holds water” because it resists the political dogmas and historical
determinisms that accompany the marching song of Progress: “as soon as it
becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress
bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation”
(Eiland and McLaughlin, 478).
Incomplete forms, articulated in fragments and dossiers, assemble the
body of the Arcades. They are physical and textual openings, breaks in the
continuity and chronology of the reading of history and literature, which
touch each other lightly to articulate an understanding of history as a practice
of translation. The present moment of the translational trope—touching,
anticipating, intimating—is neither simply the transmission of history’s past
nor its revision for the future. The “now,” enunciated in linguistic life in the
imaginative interests of historical life, is a complex state of the afterlife of
language and history. Translation in “non-linguistic life,” I believe, is the
critical matrix for understanding Benjamin’s concept of the “historical index,”
which is everywhere present in his landmark, late text, “On the Concept of
History”:

For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to
a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at
a particular time. And indeed this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a
specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present
day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now”
is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the
bursting point with time … It is not that what is past casts its light on
what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image
is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to
form a constellation.
(Eiland and McLaughlin, 462)

The historical index points us to the “now” of particularity, the “now” of

every passing present day, and in this iterative intimation of something that
is as-yet to accede “to legibility,” the historical index points like a moving
finger to what is transitional and emergent in historical constellations. The
urgency of history’s task, like the emergence of translation’s test, does not
xvi Foreword

let the writer’s hand rest: the index finger restlessly points—now … now …
now …—trying to catch up with the unfulfilled promise of those incomplete
forms of linguistic and nonlinguistic life that it is our task to make legible.
Benjamin’s historical index—pointing to an imminent, yet-to-be realized
historical legibility—resembles Wittgenstein’s concept of the language
game as a form of “pointing” to some incomplete-form in order to access
its legibility. History’s index is a movement of historical knowledge that
assumes a paradoxical form: it signifies a recognizable knowledge of the
material history of the nonlinguistic present, now in the territorial present,
while pointing to the incomplete forms of linguistic life signified now in the
tropic present.
When these “nows” touch each other tangentially, we learn the translational
lesson of the historical index: there is a difference between “knowing” one’s
history intimately as material existence and learning to “read” its intimations
through the incomplete forms of linguistic life. In this sense, knowing one’s
history and learning to read its foreign relations are complementary but they
are not the same thing—they are determined by different modes of intention.
Translation’s test takes place on the cusp between immanent knowing and
imminent reading, where truth is charged—guilty or not?—with the task of
forming a constellation in which the incomplete forms of linguistic life—
truth and beauty, fairness and justice, metaphor and materiality—become
the political projects and ethical aspirations we strive to make legible in our
nonlinguistic forms of life.
“Translation understood as an act of witnessing … is only imaginable
through a schema of translation which strives to make the multilingual
complexity of the world visible and audible,” Bertacco and Vallorani state
in their attempt to turn the trope of translation into a mode of ethical
witnessing. My brief foray into the force of translation as a coming to terms
with language’s “foreign relations” argues that worldly complexity must result
in a form of linguistic complementation. To achieve this purpose, only ever
temporal and preliminary, the sovereign nationality of languages and their
cultural supremacism must pass the test of translation’s equitable foreign
relations. When your own language is put powerfully in movement by a
foreign language, then languages echo each other in the way that dialects
differ between themselves, complementing one another in recognition,
without resemblance.
At the critical point where translation touches the original lightly and only
at the infinitely small point of the sense, it is empowered to pursue its own
course in the freedom of linguistic flux. Listen, as I end, to Valeria Luiselli’s
account of the afterlife of language and literature that emerges in the flux of
translation’s foreign relations:
 Foreword xvii

In the parts narrated by a third-person narrator, Elegies for Lost Children,

sources are embedded and paraphrased but not quoted or cited. The
Elegies are composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works
that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc. The allusions need
not be evident. I’m not interested in intertextuality as an outward,
performative gesture but as a method or procedure of composition.
The first elegies allude to Ezra Pound’s “Canto I,” which is itself an
“allusion” to Homer’s Book XI of the Odyssey—his “Canto I” is a free
translation from Latin, and not Greek, into English, following Anglo-
Saxon accentual verse metrics, of Book XI of the Odyssey. Book XI of
Homer’s Odyssey, as well as Pound’s “Canto I,” is about journeying/
descending into the underworld. So, in the opening Elegies about
the lost children, I reappropriate certain rhythmic cadences as well
as imagery and lexicon from Homer/Pound, in order to establish an
analogy between migrating and descending into the underworld.
I repurpose and recombine words or word-pairings like “swart/night,”
“heavy/weeping,” and “stretched/wretched”—all of which derive from
lines in “Canto I.”
(Luiselli 2019, 380)
 Acknowledgments

We began this book in 2016, a few days after the Brexit Referendum and
in a moment of international turmoil, specifically connected to the issue
of mass migrations. It was conceived as a way of working together, on the
grounds of a long-established friendship and collaboration, despite living
and teaching in different continents and therefore observing the same events
from different vantage points.
First and foremost, and with profound gratitude, we want to thank Homi
K. Bhabha, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration. Choosing
to go back to The Location of Culture as a starting point for our own reflection
was certainly ambitious and paralyzing at first, but it also provided a challenge
that we felt was needed. Homi Bhabha’s research and teaching were our main
reference points through every stage of this project. He then accepted to
preface our work, and this is a priceless honor and a shelter for which we will
be forever grateful.
Emily Jacir and Mario Badagliacca kindly granted permission to use
images of their artwork in this book and, for permission to republish a
section of Chapter 2, we gratefully acknowledge Small Axe 62 (2020).
Our thanks also go to the academic institutions where we work, the
Università degli Studi di Milano and the University of Louisville. In different
ways, they nourish academic scholarship in the humanities, and we hope
this support will last. We are very grateful to the Doctoral School in “Studi
linguistici, letterari e interculturali” (Linguistic, Literary and Intercultural
Studies) at the Università degli Studi di Milano, which granted a visiting
professorship and the possibility to work with doctoral students who
helped us discuss the issues under exam. We are equally thankful to the
Department of Comparative Humanities and the Ph.D. in Humanities at
the University of Louisville whose interdisciplinary model of a humanities
education has provided the perfect environment in which to envision and
carry out this project. Our colleagues, on both sides of the Atlantic, have
always been supportive, and we wish to thank, in particular, Pamela Beattie,
Lisa Björkman, Alessandra Di Maio, Karl Swinehart, Patrick Heaney, Paolo
Caponi, Nicoletta Di Ciolla, Cinzia Scarpino, Anna Pasolini, Emanuele
Monegato, Laura Scarabelli, and Patricia Hampton for being inspiring
interlocutors at various stages of this project as well as for their precious
feedback.
 Acknowledgments xix

Occasions to present our work in progress were provided by seminars,

lectures, conferences, and professional meetings that we attended
together and individually. We wish to thank AIA (Associazione Italiana
di Anglistica [Italian Association of English Studies]) for hosting—
as a Master class anticipating their Summer School in 2018—a round
table on translation and migration (The Good Life: Translation, Worldly
Knowledge and the Postcolonial Text) involving Simona Bertacco, and
for providing plenty of occasions for discussing current theories of
translation at the 2019 Summer School (Translated Wor(l)ds: Perspectives,
Domains and Directions, June 3–7, 2019). Special thanks go to Loredana
Polezzi whose lecture on migration and translation (“The Translational/
Transnational Memory of Translation”) offered an inspiration for this
project. A different approach was chosen for the conference CriMiNaRe.
Crime, Migration, Narration, Resistance (November 24–25, 2016), which
was conceived as an occasion for an interdisciplinary and international
discussion on issues of crime and migration. For this we thank the research
center CHAIN (Criminal Hero: Archive of In-between Narratives) at the
Università degli Studi di Milano.
We wish to thank the many colleagues who invited us to present parts of
this project at their universities: Jeremy Killian at Coastal Carolina University;
Desrine Bogle at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; and
Donna Jo Napoli at Swarthmore College. And also Maria Cecilia Rizzardi
at the University of Pisa, Silvia Albertazzi at the University of Bologna,
Maria Micaela Coppola at the University of Trento, Serena Guarracino at the
University of L’Aquila, Silvia Antosa at the University “Koré” of Enna, and
Giulia Despuches at the University of Palermo. To each of these colleagues
goes our warmest gratefulness.
Lastly, there are some people without whom this book really would not
have been written. At Bloomsbury, we owe the hugest debt to Brian Baer
and Michelle Woods for their unwavering support for this project from the
very beginning, their enthusiasm for the idea of this book, and their serious
and generous feedback; to Haaris Naqvi, Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, Rachel
Walker and Shanmathi Priya Sampath for their precious help at every stage
of the project. We were also very fortunate in the two anonymous reviewers
enlisted: their engaged and rigorous comments helped immeasurably in
guiding the revision of the manuscript.
During the years we have spent studying translation and migration, we
noticed that we were often drawing the same conclusions. This may also
depend on the fact that we both believe that the humanities can and must
change the way we approach and try to solve problems. Therefore, unusual as
xx Acknowledgments

it may be, we are deeply grateful for the way in which each author supported
the other. Writing this book has been like playing cat’s cradle in the sense
that Donna Haraway, in her Staying with the Trouble, suggests—a sympoiesis
waiting to be completed by the readers.
 Introduction

A place on the map is also a place in history.

—Adrienne Rich, “Notes towards a Politics of Location,” 1984

0.1 The Location and Relocation of Culture

This is a book about accents and borders, about people that have accents,
and cultures that cross borders. It claims that language, translation, and the
humanities are important tools to come to grips with contemporary affairs
and to produce new forms of understanding, civility, and citizenship in
response to the situations around us. The book deals with translation and
migration and with the ways in which the current phenomenon of global
migrations has sharply raised the currency of translation—in practical as
well as theoretical terms—as an area of study. Instead of seeing translation
merely as a movement of meaning across languages, cultures, and borders,
we read translation as a relocating act: of meanings and texts but also of
people and cultures. As a keyword of today’s global culture, in fact, relocation
commonly refers to the redistribution of migrants, but it also describes the
cultural and linguistic adjustments that people who move from one form of
belonging to another know firsthand. In its current usage, that is, relocation
contains both “the contours of inclusion and exclusion” (Inghilleri 2017, 2)
and, therefore, needs to be understood in more dynamic and diversified
terms than is commonly done.
The basic idea of the book is to explore in depth the theoretical and practical
nexus of translation and migration, two of the most visible and anxiety-
producing keywords of our age, and to use translation as the foundation
for a global cultural theory firmly grounded in the humanities—both as
creative output and method of scholarship. Thus, we decline translation as
migration and vice versa, proposing a close reading of the different schemas
implicit in what Brian Baer calls the “fact of translation” (Baer 2020, 140)—
or translation proper—and their relation to “the fact” of migration in both
political and cultural terms. As Homi Bhabha writes, “The liminality of the
2 The Relocation of Culture

migrant experience is no less a transitional phenomenon than a translational

one; there is no resolution to it because the two conditions are ambivalently
enjoined in the ‘survival’ of migrant life” (Bhabha 2004, 321). Caught between
their status as “a problem”—what Benjamin defines “the irresolution, or
liminality, of translation” (Benjamin 1968, 75)—and their inability of being
totally translatable into the new culture, in fact, migrants today are still
“almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 2004, 123).
In the preface to the 2004 Routledge Classic Edition of The Location
of Culture, Bhabha looks back on his own theoretical trajectory and takes
a step forward with the definition of “a vernacular cosmopolitanism” as a
useful concept to rethink the discourses of globalization today. And it is the
fiction by the often-criticized Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul that Bhabha
offers as emblematic of the vernacular condition of contemporary planetary
life: “Naipaul’s people are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving in-
between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do
not have a prior existence within the discrete world of any single culture and
language” (Bhabha 2004, xiii). The implications of this view are such that,
on the one hand, we cannot fully understand migration without confronting
the multiple translation processes that accompany it—linguistic, cultural,
legal, occupational, etc.—and, on the other hand, we cannot fully understand
translation if we do not also see the physical and material aspects, beyond
the linguistic and textual level, through which it impacts the lives of the
“vernacular cosmopolitans” of our times.
The book title explicitly pays homage to two texts that taught the current
generation of educators and social activists in what, in critical theory, was
called the West and now is often referred to as the “epistemological” North
(Santos 2018) to begin their work as intellectuals by locating themselves
on the world map. Adrienne Rich’s “Notes towards a Politics of Location”
(1984) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994, 2004) provided
a shared vocabulary to talk about culture, identity, and agency through a
concrete engagement with the politics of the body, gender, decolonization,
and translation. Now that more than a quarter century has elapsed since the
first publication of Rich’s and Bhabha’s seminal works, and in a world context
where migration has irrefutably become a central issue in the political,
cultural, economic, and sociological agenda for countries all over the world,
it seems important to resume and engage with the conversation they started
and the terms it has produced. It is no coincidence that Bhabha’s 2004 preface
finds one of its most effective moments in the close reading of two poems, the
first one by Adrienne Rich (Bhabha 2004, xix) and the second one by Prakash
Jadhav (Bhabha 2004, xxi): two different artists who strive to find the words
to explore porous and complex forms of belonging—whatever the word has
 Introduction 3

come to mean—and who both find in the “right to narrate” the first necessary
step toward “our national or communal identity in a global world” (Bhabha
2004, xx).
We begin, then, with one of the new terms in Bhabha’s cultural lexicon—the
third space of cultural translation—a concept that tied together translation,
decolonization, and space in a way that made it possible to interpret
twentieth-century culture from the vantage point of the postcolony. In the
1990s and after, “cultural translation” became a buzz word, especially within
anglophone postcolonial studies, and was both revered and criticized, but it
marked, in fact, an important attempt to bring translation into a politically
informed discussion about cultural relations and humanistic knowledge
in the context of a world heavily marked by the aftermath of colonialism
but rarely studied through its lens.1 In What Is Cultural Translation?, Sarah
Maitland writes that the fact that cultural translation has given life to such
a “vociferous debate augurs well for the future” (Maitland 2017, 82). The
question, she claims, “is not how we should go about limiting cultural
translation’s use of the interlingual model but to ask why the interlingual
model should be used as the foundation for cultural translation in the first
instance” (Maitland 2017, 84). Indeed, approaching the critical discussion of
migration through translation provides us with a useful vocabulary to study,
describe, and come to terms with the complexities of the phenomenon and
the direct and indirect ways in which migration, like translation, touches us,
both individually and collectively.
What has changed since the early 1990s, when the debate around cultural
translation first emerged, in fact, is the intensity of the migration flow and the
rapid growth in the number of stateless people.2 Quite understandably, these
dramatic changes have brought to the forefront of the popular discourse at
least two main reactions to the increased global mobility: anxiety and fear.
As Moira Inghilleri writes, “Migration as a phenomenon is understood
both positively and negatively when associated with invasion, unwanted

1
For an exhaustive reconstruction of the genealogy of the academic use of the term “cultural
translation” and the lively debate it gave rise to, see Sarah Maitland (2017, 59–84).
2
The 2020 UN World Migration Report states that the number of international migrants
in June 2019 was estimated to be almost 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds
being labor migrants. The Syrian Arab Republic and Turkey were the origin and host
of the largest number of refugees globally, and Canada became the largest refugee
resettlement country, resettling more refugees than the United States in 2018. The
Philippines had the largest number of new disaster displacements in 2018 (3.8 million).
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was the largest source country of asylum seekers
in 2018. Available at https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf (last
accessed: June 7, 2020).
4 The Relocation of Culture

competition, dependence, or unclenched forms of exclusion” (Inghilleri

2017, 16). It has become clear that the local and the global face each other
particularly in sites where migration is most visible. Border politics are the
hub of today’s efforts at coping with hybridity, and it is precisely on the border
that translations occur constantly and in a multiplicity of ways.
The theoretical and practical node of translation and migration provides
the main axis of study supporting our work; it gives structure to the volume
and governs the textual case studies analyzed in order to offer an engaged
humanistic model. The complexity of the topic has forced us to approach
the discussion on migration and translation through a multidisciplinary
perspective and an admittedly diverse, if not eclectic, supporting bibliography.
Among the scholars who have explored the migration-translation dyad in
recent years, we are particularly indebted to the work of Michael Cronin
(2003, 2006), Loredana Polezzi (2012), Edwin Gentzler (2017), and Moira
Inghilleri (2017), which will be referenced widely in the following chapters.
However, in this book, we also want to focus on language both, as Stuart
Hall famously put it, as a “representational system of culture” (Hall, Evans
and Nixon 1997, 1), but also, as Moira Inghilleri insightfully adds, as “an
active site where the contours of inclusion and exclusion become most
visible” (Inghilleri 2017, 2). In our focus on translation, we are not interested
in translation as a form of normalization, or “translation from above,” but in
translation as a mode of self-articulation and agency, or “translation from
below.” Our analysis will therefore include a wide variety of texts—hence
a multiplicity of codes—all of them broadly conceivable as communicative
events and aimed at articulating difference differently.
As new walls are being erected, regulations imposed to contain, prevent,
criminalize migration, most visibly in Europe and the United States, the
border emerges as a key location where migration and translation overlap
and where the role of translation in the migration process can be fully
explored through an experiential and ethical lens. Whether geographical,
symbolic, or both, the line drawn between one culture/nation/language/
religion and the other still maintains the magic aura of the Conradian edge:
once you step over it, you are “translated” into something different from
what you used to be. Anticipating what has now come true, in the mid-1990s
Bhabha wrote that “[i]t is in this sense that the boundary becomes the place
from which something begins its ‘presencing’ in a movement not dissimilar
to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond that I have drawn
out” (Bhabha 2004, 7). The “borderline work of culture” (Bhabha 2004,
10) consists in an endless process of displacement and relocation, where
language as a signifying practice holds a key role, both as a tool of empathy
and inclusion and as a means of othering and exclusion.
 Introduction 5

Thus, location, translation, migration, borders are both the abstract notions
and the material phenomena that constitute the cornerstones of this book as
it studies the practical and humane outcomes of migration and considers the
ways in which translation—if taken as a method of knowledge—involves us
directly in the process. Since language and emotions interlace in many ways,
differences are often difficult to measure or are so deeply intertwined with
our culture as to hardly reach the level of critical awareness. In everyday life,
we “translate” our feelings about the foreigner—the invader, the criminal, the
shadowy enemy—into attitudes and emotional reactions that are instinctual
and almost prelinguistic. Language—any language—marks a step forward.
It signals awareness and requires a notion of translation that is complex and
nuanced if it is to be of use as a tool to decipher the density of the world in
which we live.

0.2 Disciplinary Border-Crossings

Reading translation through a line of thinking that connects scholars as

diverse as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Venuti, Vicente
Rafael, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter, Sherry Simon, Rebecca
Walkowitz, Sandro Mezzadra, and Naoki Sakai,3 this book argues that by using
translation as a lens on the contemporary global condition and as a mode of
thinking and seeing the world, we are engaging in the global humanities,
that is to say, in a humanities scholarship that is—in its intentions—not just
Eurocentric, Western or Northern, and not just theoretical. Translation, we
argue, is the new vocabulary of this scholarship. By bringing together the
disciplinary fields of translation studies and literary and cultural studies,
with necessary references to postcolonial studies, migration studies, and
world literature, we aim at articulating a critical idiom able to bridge the gap
between academic discourse and social issues, a theory that, as Adrienne
Rich poetically wrote, when it attempts to capture the larger patterns in the
world, must retain the “smell” of the things it describes:

Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees—

theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects the rain cloud

3
This list is far from exhaustive, but all the scholars mentioned above share the effort to
bring together different disciplinary fields in their work on issues of multilingualism,
cultural studies, migration studies, and translation.
6 The Relocation of Culture

and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it
isn’t good for the earth.
(Rich 1984, 213–14)

While each part of this book establishes a dialogue with a specific field, the
overall project locates itself firmly in literary and cultural studies and in
translation studies, that is, in two disciplinary macro-areas that have known
alternate phases of fortune and visibility within the intellectual debate at the
turn of the millennium.
The institutional and critical positioning of cultural studies is complex
and uneven to say the least on the intellectual global map. As Lidia Curti,
one of its Italian most vocal representatives, writes, its practitioners are both
central and marginal (Curti 1992, 134–53), and as a discursive formation,
it finds a (temporary) definition in a project explicitly built to gather
multiple discourses resulting from positionalities that are never absolute.
These positionalities—springing from what Bhabha called “social agency”
(Bhabha 2004, 269)—“can’t be translated intact from one conjuncture to
another; they cannot be depended on to remain in the same place” (Hall
1992, 277).
The flexibility inbuilt in anglophone cultural studies—in its British
moment as well as in its US theoretical and practical inflections—and that
results from its many encounters with Marxism, structuralism, semiotics, and
poststructuralism, provides the field with an ability to approach the “infinite
semiosis of meaning” (Hall 1992, 284) that is currently becoming the most
relevant outcome of relocation through migration. Questions surrounding
language—as it was for Raymond Williams—continue being central, although
the very word language is to be understood in its wider meaning, thus allowing
for a consideration of texts, meanings, and cultures as sites of representation
and resistance (Hall 1992, 285). The interdisciplinary mandate that was
proper to cultural studies from the beginning, the inbuilt attitude to produce
connections across different fields of study, and the porosity of its borders
allow for a multiplicity of approaches that may prove useful to this project.
In particular, Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between grande histoire and
petits récits (1979) and Yuri Lotman’s reflections on the typologies of cultures
(Lotman and Uspenskij 2001) easily intertwine with the shared statement of
a need for the intellectual (public or academic) to be engaged with the real
world. In the process of building a working agenda to approach marginal
cultures, cultural studies constantly hybridizes with other contiguous
fields (mostly pertaining to the areas of sociology, anthropology, history,
and geography) to produce a method aimed at resisting its transformation
into a purely speculative theorization while retaining its nature of “site of
 Introduction 7

political struggle” (Carrington 2001, 281). In some of Paul Gilroy’s recent

reflections—Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker than Blue: On the
Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (2010)—cultural studies connects
deeply with the mandate of postcolonial studies, while the many reflections
on fear and anxiety resulting from the closer contact with the cultural other
tend to find their critical shape not only in European cultural studies, but also
in American cultural theory, transnational studies, ecocriticism, and world
literature.
On the other hand, the field of translation studies maintains a focus on
our lives in language at the center of the discussion. As Mary Louise Pratt
reminds us in a powerful piece about the vulnerability of idioms, “[A]ll
languages belong to their speakers in a way they do not belong to everyone
else” (Pratt 2016, 246). We can all relate to this aspect of our lives in personal
and intimate terms. Making a different language recognizable to our
listeners or our readers and struggling with an accent that we wish we could
dissimulate are all very common experiences for foreigners and qualify the
(inter)language that they speak, a language that—just as the culture it gives
voice to—is marked by the process of translation.
If we move from the personal to the social level, we are likely to find,
as Sandra Berman perceptively writes, that issues of nation, language, and
translation have never been “more important or more troubling than they
are today” (Berman 2005, 1–2). Information, medical, political, military
networks, governmental agencies, and international organizations, such
as the UN and the EU, translate constantly for purposes of intelligence,
policy, negotiation, or more simply for the dissemination of information.
Yet, as a discipline, translation is often overlooked, considered as little more
than “a necessary interface” (Berman 2005, 2) and not deeply intertwined
with “real world” matters as is the case, instead, for the STEM disciplines:
science, technology, engineering, mathematics. According to Berman, the
reason behind this is that language and translation belong so fully to what
we traditionally think of as the humanities, and the humanities—as the
disciplines that study languages, literatures, history, philosophy, the arts,
etc.—are taken to be rather “impractical” subjects. A quick look at the New
Oxford American Dictionary’s definition of impractical completes the picture:
“not adapted for use or action,” “not sensible or realistic,” and of a person “not
skilled or interested in practical matters.”4
Thus, the situation exposes a paradox: translation has never been more
crucial to the globalized lives we lead, yet it is perceived as lacking practical

4
New Oxford American Dictionary. 3rd edition. Edited by Angus Stevenson and Christine
A. Lindberg. New York: Oxford University Press (2010), 2016.
8 The Relocation of Culture

value. This is the space of intervention of this book as a project firmly

grounded in the conviction that, despite the general perception, matters of
language and translation are central to civic life and show the practical side
of humanistic training.
A border discipline itself, translation studies has produced some of the
most cutting-edge work in the humanities over the past fifty years. We need
to only mention Lawrence Venuti’s work on the invisibility of translators
(1995), Sherry Simon’s work on gender and translation (1996), Susan
Bassnett and Harish Trivedi’s work (1999) on postcolonial translation,
Michael Cronin’s work on translation and globalization (2003), Maria
Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler’s work on translation and power (2002) to
have an idea of the broad range of directions that the field has taken. Indeed,
translation has rapidly expanded into a “metaconcept” (Blumczynski 2016,
137) and has been appropriated by adjacent fields such as comparative and
world literature (Damrosch 2003; Apter 2006, 2008, 2013; Walkowitz 2015),
but also less adjacent ones such as sociology and economics (Sakai and
Solomon 2006, Mezzadra 2008), and even science and medicine where labels
such as “translational research” and “translational medicine” have gained
currency since the 1990s (Rubio 2010).5 Therefore, as a border notion,
that is, a notion that defines itself on the border of experiences, cultures,
and disciplines, translation is well positioned to capture the nuances of the
complex historical phenomenon of current migrations, and trying to define
what translation is and where it occurs today has served as a compass in this
project.

0.3 Translation as Migration

Migration is the historical and social phenomenon this book explores,

and translation is our main conceptual tool. More specifically, our project
falls under the category of what Anita Starosta calls “accented criticism”
to describe a new orientation for humanistic inquiry—within the global
university and the globalized world—that sees translation as its compass.

5
The American National Health Institute defines translational research as follows:
“Translational research includes two areas of translation. One is the process of applying
discoveries generated during research in the laboratory, and in preclinical studies, to the
development of trials and studies in humans. The second area of translation concerns
research aimed at enhancing the adoption of best practices in the community” (quoted
in Rubio 2010, 471).
 Introduction 9

Starosta proposes to use translation “as a lens on the contemporary moment

and […] as an irreducible and permanent condition of thinking and reading”
(Starosta 2013, 174). In the chapters that follow, we articulate a “translation
literacy,” which can be roughly defined as an ability to acknowledge and
assess the translational aspects of the world around us. Indeed, by using
translation as a mode of reading, we might actually read texts as well as
daily news differently; as educators, we might want to make sure that the
translations of the texts we use in our syllabi are from the original language
and not from another translation; or that the translation is a reliable and
respected one; we might consider the where and why of translations, or the
impact that individual translators have had on shaping a “global taste” or a
field of scholarship, and so on.
To give an example of what a translation literacy might look like, we take
three fairly recent translation stories: the “renaissance” of John William’s
novel Stoner (Akbar 2013), the “Ferrante Fever” (Durzi 2017), and the 2008
retranslation into English of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs
(Black Skin, White Masks). The first case study can be described as the
global renaissance of John Williams’s novel Stoner, which was effectively
described by Tim Kreiden on the pages of The New Yorker as “the greatest
American novel you’ve never heard of ” (Kreiden 2013). Published in
1965, Stoner is a quiet book about ordinary academic life, about a farm
boy in Missouri who in 1910, during an undergraduate English class, is
left speechless by the emotions stirred in him by literature and who finds
in that moment the vocation that will guide him through life. Nothing
about the novel or its plot is extraordinary or remarkable, which perhaps
explains why it is not considered a major American novel. However, in
2011, the French writer Anna Gavalda—having read it in English for lack
of a French translation—decided to translate it, giving the book a brand-
new life, an unprecedented visibility, and a new, mostly European and
Israeli, circulation. “It was the novel’s sudden success in France in 2011
that alerted other publishers to its possibilities,” writes Julian Barnes in
The Guardian, calling it “the must-read novel of 2013” (Barnes 2013). For
several months in 2013, in fact, Stoner was the best-selling novel in the
Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Barnes notices “a further
oddity” about the revival of Stoner: “[I]t seems to be a purely European
(and Israeli) phenomenon” (Barnes 2013), not started in the United States,
where the book was from, but that led to its new and successful American
edition as a Vintage Classic in 2012.
A similar story where the translation, even though not belated as in
Stoner’s case, drives the success of a book outside of its original language
and country explains the international phenomenon of Elena Ferrante’s
10 The Relocation of Culture

quartet L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend), first published in Italian in

2012 and translated the same year into English by Ann Goldstein who, at
the time, was head of the copy department at The New Yorker. James Wood
describes Ferrante as “one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary
writers” (Wood 2013), referring to the author’s privacy and her choice to
write under a pseudonym. In 2017, a documentary, aptly entitled Ferrante
Fever, by Giacomo Durzi gathered an array of intellectual and political
celebrities of the caliber of Hillary Clinton, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth
Strout, and Roberto Saviano, with the intent to try to explain what makes
Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels “hypnotic,” and finally, in 2018, an HBO/RAI
series directed by Saverio Costanzo adapted the novels for the screen to great
international acclaim.
In both this and Stoner’s case, the work, the visibility, and the institutional
location of the translators provided the novels with important and visible
platforms and transnational audiences that, while granting them an
unexpected life, also reveal a fascinating web of connections across countries,
intellectual institutions, readers, and markets. Yet what remains unexplained
is what exactly made these translated books so successful, and more successful
“abroad” than “at home.”
The last case study, instead, is more explicitly related to the world of
higher education and scholarship and concerns the 2008 retranslation into
English of Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs by Richard Philcox,
the partner and translator of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. The new
translation had a remarkable impact in the field of anglophone postcolonial
studies because it transformed the “activist Fanon” of the 1970s into “the
postcolonial Fanon” of the 2000s. One of the central chapters in Fanon’s
book—chapter 5 “L’ expérience vécue du Noir”—was translated by Charles
Lam Markmann in 1967 as “The Fact of Blackness” and rendered instead
by Richard Philcox as “The Lived Experience of the Black Man.” The 1967
translation of Fanon’s book bore the traits of the historical and intellectual
milieu and of the publishing house that was commissioning the translation.
The 1968 Black Cat edition, published by Grove Press, was in fact in large
part responsible for turning Fanon into the champion for the then emergent
African American liberationist discourse in the United States. In 2008,
instead, Richard Philcox, as a profound connoisseur not only of Fanon’s
Martinican background but also of his active engagement with continental
philosophy, especially the phenomenology of Marcel Merleau-Ponty, wishes
to recuperate Fanon as a theorist and an intellectual, which well responds
to the role and significance of Frantz Fanon’s work in postcolonial and
decolonial studies today.
 Introduction 11

This digression on translation and global culture shows the extent to

which—at least some—translations touch us daily, in books, on television,
online, at school, sometimes without us even realizing it, and makes the
case for a translation literacy to become a “pressing concern,” as Brian
Baer insightfully points out, next to digital or information literacy in our
global university syllabi (Baer 2020, 157). Seeing the work of translation
and of individual translators in action, in fact, allows us to achieve an
understanding of globalization also in humanistic—and educational—terms
and to see translation, to use a visual metaphor, in high definition, outside of
“a Romantic discourse of loss and distortion” (Baer 2020, 140) that will only
see translation as an impossible achievement, a necessary evil, or as second-
order knowledge and ignore its material, political, and economic existence
as “one of the fundamental modes of operation of global capital” (Mezzadra
2010, 122).
Reacting against such a reductive vision of translation as loss and death,
Salman Rushdie famously called himself and all migrants “translated people”
(Rushdie 1991, 17), a metaphor that is often used, and perhaps abused, today
to describe the many migrants of the Mediterranean that occupy the front
pages of newspapers (Sofo 2015; Soyinka and Di Maio 2016). By connecting
the act of translation to the physical displacement of people and to a condition
of human existence, in 1991, Rushdie would pave the way to discussions of
translation “to describe and even explain identity as it surfaces in travelling,
migrating, diasporic, and border-crossing individuals and cultures” (Arduini
and Nergaard 2011, 8) with which we are engaging in this book. The lesson
that we have learned is that texts and people do not remain the same after an
experience of dislocation: something changes forever, but people and texts
can and do live on.
The step forward, therefore, is to see the broad spectrum of translated
lives around us but also to ask some important questions of ourselves. How
do we understand the stories of translated people that surround us? Through
which schemas of the world? Using translation as the method with which
to approach today’s stories of migration, this book questions what literary
and cultural criticism might look like if representation is understood as
experiential and experimental, and what it does to our long-held categories
regarding cultures, people, and languages.
Thus, we begin this book by theorizing language and culture from within
the social, cultural, and political contingencies of today, which means
engaging with migration as a fact of our culture, with plurilingualism as the
normal condition of planetary cultural life, and with translation as a way
of life as is captured effectively by the blog post below:
12 The Relocation of Culture

Figure 0.1 The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www.
facebook.com/queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444355356188583/?ty
pe=3&theater6

0.4 Migration as Translation

In the Western world, we are experiencing an increasing flow of writings

of different kinds (both narrative and critical), all trying to account for the
tragedy that is taking place in the Mediterranean Sea. The twofold reactions
of artists and researchers, globally, result in a Janus-faced attitude. On

6
The Queer Diasporist’s Facebook Post available at: https://www.facebook.com/
queerdiasporist/photos/a.365969260693860/444355356188583/?type=3&theater
 Introduction 13

the one hand, we want to provide tools for understanding a process that
is ominous and disturbing and that in fact requires a readjustment of our
social as well as epistemological frameworks. On the other, as Gikandi wrote
in 2001, we seem unable to realize that the issue of migration is not merely
an historical occurrence springing from the late failure of colonization as
a would-be civilizing process, but also an actual tragedy resulting in the
actual suffering and death of human beings shipwrecked on the coasts of
the Mediterranean Sea (Gikandi 2001, 631–2). What we normally do is
translate this process into a text that is understandable to us. The inclusive
“we” gathers diverging varieties of Westerners and includes both artists
and scholars, activists and non-activists. We produce texts, on the ground
of the most obvious use of representation, which is to generate meanings,
or to reshape already familiar meanings so as to make them graspable,
manageable, controllable.
In our work here we want to combine translation as a metaphor and
the fact of translation (Baer 2020, 143), trying to devise some research
and pedagogical tools that may be useful to approach the experience of
migrancy through its cultural representations. Looking at some cultural texts
and considering the most recurring strategies exploited by several creative
artists (both in images and in words), we spot two sometimes converging
attitudes that seem to suggest two “modes” of translation. In both of them,
the Western, most familiar cultural traditions—what we may define the
shared cultural codes—are exploited, though in different ways. In the first
“mode” of translation, some artists try to inscribe the migrant experience
within canonical Western codes (as it happens, for example, in Nilüfer
Demir’s photo or in Erri De Luca’s short film). In the second, artists choose
to reverse some familiar images or shared beliefs and to estrange them as to
show the dramatic absurdity of what is happening in the Mediterranean Sea
(as in Caccia’s short film or in Badagliacca’s photographs).
Within this horizon and considering the differences in the world order
between fifty years ago and today, Said’s words about exile may be of use.
Reflecting on his own condition of non-belonging—a condition that, we must
remind ourselves, was sad but privileged in comparison to what is happening
today to migrants in the Mediterranean Sea—Said introduces the notion of a
“plurality of vision” as an effect of being an exile (Said 1984). In very simple
terms, this means that the monologic surface of representation—so quiet
and understandable when you belong to a certain culture—is broken, and
this break calls for a different “way of seeing” (Berger 2008) that must be
plural and that gives rise to “an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an
awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal” (Said 1984,
148). Being a contrapuntal human being is a complex condition. It means
14 The Relocation of Culture

renouncing the stability of one’s own land (geographically and symbolically)

to enter a territory that resembles more an archipelago of small islands than a
continent, and constantly moving, by sea, through stormy weather and dead
calm, from one landing to another.
In Europe, starting in the 1970s, millions of African migrants have
retraced the millennial routes across the Mediterranean Sea (Di Maio 2012,
152).7 The question now is not why they leave—an issue that should be clear
enough in its relation to the many troubles marking their homelands—but,
rather, what prevailing attitude qualifies their choice to leave. To a large
extent, the people migrating today know from birth that they are going to
be obliged to leave, mostly because of the never concluded process of nation
building after the end of historical colonialism (Santos 2018, 109). This latter
has created the need—theoretical as well as pragmatic—of rethinking the
very concept of nation as a stable entity, producing an endless proliferation
of in-between identities (Di Maio 2012, 162). It is true that the migration
flow has increased enormously in a comparatively short span of time. But the
most interesting—and in some respect tragic—change concerns the varieties
of migrants, who now come from many different African countries, as well as
from the Middle East, all of whom face administrative, political, economic,
and even moral troubles that have remained cogently unresolved for many
years. Biographically belonging to unstable countries, the people fleeing are,
in a sense, fated to flee and doomed from the start. They are, in some way,
“born translated” (Walkowitz 2015).
“Born translated” is an idea introduced by Rebecca Walkowitz in
her reflections on a corpus of literary works that seem to be “written for
translation, in the hope of being translated, but they are also written as
translation, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in
which they have, in fact, been composed” (Walkowitz 2015, 4). This notion
may also be applied to people living in the condition described above: they
are natural-born migrants in that they know for sure that they are not going
to be allowed to grow up and get old in the place where they were born. When

7
According to the UN 2017 International Migration Report, 2016 was the record year for
the number of people displaced from their homes since the Second World War when the
UN started keeping the records; in 2015 alone, over 1 million migrants reached Europe
crossing the Mediterranean Sea. By population, the report said Syria still accounts for the
biggest number of displaced people at 12 million, followed by Colombia with 7.7 million,
Afghanistan with 4.7 million, Iraq with 4.2 million, and South Sudan at 3.3 million.
Those rankings do not include the long-standing Palestinian population of roughly 5.3
million, but that figure is included in the total. https://www.un.org/en/development/
desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_
Highlights.pdf
 Introduction 15

migrating, they become translated people, in Rushdie’s words, and this is an

issue linked not merely to language but also to a whole existential condition,
which is lived in very different ways. They experience the same gap that
Bhabha mentions between “languages lived and languages learned” (Bhabha
2004, x), where the notion of language involves a whole way of life.
Therefore, even though the discourse of migration in the Mediterranean
Sea is not a new one and goes back to ancient Greece (Malkin 1998),8 it is
quite true that the contingencies of history make some difference in the
nature of migration,9 separating the legal profile of the asylum seeker from
that of the illegal immigrant, an outlaw subject to penalties. The condition
of stranger-in-need is a liminal one, and both the law and popular culture
have difficulties in translating their identity into something understandable.
Both the language and the culture we use to represent and account for the
migrants’ presence among us are unstable and ineffective, and they need some
adjustment. What happens today twines with the issue of asylum claiming as
“a form of double-voiced discourse (in the Bakhtinian sense that no instance
of language can be monologic, because each utterance contains multiple
utterances and moments of speech)” (Farrier 2011, 6). At the same time, the
current condition goes beyond the mere issue of language and calls for the
interweaving of multiple critical discourses, necessarily evoking the tools and
strategies of translation in an utterly new way. As a method, translation must
become able to account for the human experience of being translated from
one place to another: an experience that is linked to language, articulated via
language, but that goes beyond it.

0.5 Two Authors, One Book

The book is divided into two symmetrical parts. In the first part, written by
the US-based literary critic Simona Bertacco, translation occupies the central
focus and is declined from the point of view of migration as it is understood
today: as an unsettling process that is inconceivable according to the national

8
Irad Malkin, in The Return of Odysseus, provides an articulate reflection of “the
ambivalence implied in exploration and protocolonization,” showing how the notion of
imagined community was in fact shaped by the many ways in which ethnos and nation
interlaced and were progressively translated in the Mediterranean Sea (Malkin 1998,
4–30).
9
The fact that the replacement program was meant to patrol the Italian coastline and could
count on, approximately, one-third of the resources of “Mare Nostrum” has modified the
profile of the migrant, instantly transforming it into that of a criminal.
16 The Relocation of Culture

models of culture inherited in Eurocentric educational systems. Part One,

which is entitled “Translation as Migration,” includes chapters that focus on
the view of knowledge, literature, and culture that we can extract from the
practice of translation that surrounds us in our everyday lives. The disciplinary
angle is that offered by postcolonial and translation studies, Bertacco’s areas
of specialization, and the chapters articulate a critical literacy—a translation
literacy—that can be established by seeing translation as an experiential and
epistemological condition of human life.
Chapter 1 asks what new knowledge can be gained if we think (of)
translation outside the usual dichotomies of native language/homeland
versus foreign language/homeland and develops a new schema of translation
premised on the acknowledgment that we live in heavily translational
cultures and, very likely, always have. The nexus between translation and
migration offers an ideal test case to imagine a theory of translation that
starts from the ground up and establishes what we call a “translation literacy”
through close readings of translational works by Palestinian artist Emily
Jacir and Mexican American writer Valeria Luiselli. Chapter 2 expands
the discussion to the literary field by considering as exemplary a body of
literature—postcolonial literature—that has been produced via multiple
acts of translation. As a corpus of writing that needs to be approached not
only transnationally but also translingually, postcolonial literature provides
the ideal context to study translation and migration. Notions of accents,
dialects, and the exploration of a creole poetics constitute the main foci
of this chapter, and an “accented reading” (i.e., a critical practice that sees
the accent in writing as a plus and, through the lens of translation, is able
to discuss it) of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand
is offered as an alternative model to traditionally monolingual reading
practices. Translation emerges as the premise that can allow a decolonial—
or accented—reading practice by making the reader enter the translative
exchange as a translator.
Part Two is entitled “Migration as Translation” and is authored by the
Italian cultural theorist and novelist Nicoletta Vallorani. The key concept in
this part is that of the border, and the basic assumption is that migration is
a kind of translation, symbolically implying the total revision of one’s own
identity, pragmatically requiring a new language, and in fact producing
translated people. Chapter 3 focuses on the border as the place of translation
of a migrant’s identity. The context analyzed is that of the Mediterranean
Sea, caught as it is today in the pathway of desperate routes of migration
toward northern Europe. The chapter examines, in an historical perspective,
the European fear of the other and considers specific representations
of the migrant that are passed around and “translated” according to the
 Introduction 17

cultural framework of each European country. The borders considered in

this chapter are, respectively, the boats, the detention and identification
sites, the refugee camps, the temporary shelters for migrant women and
unaccompanied minors. Through the analysis of the forms of representations
and iconization imposed onto the migrants in these places, Vallorani shows
how “borders, far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows,
have become essential devices for their articulation” (Farrier 2011, 6). The
texts taken into consideration are authored by Anders Lustgarten, Maylis de
Kerangal, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Jenny Erpenbeck, Chris Cleave, Vanessa
Redgrave, Margaret Mazzantini, Davide Enia, and Lina Prosa. Chapter 4
is entirely dedicated to the language of images. Vallorani focuses on visual
representations, working on the assumption that photographs, films, videos,
and drawings are translated as much as linguistic texts when crossing borders
and entering a culture that is different from the one in which they originated.
We start on the assumption that the gaze is also influenced by the colonial
semiosis (Mignolo 2000, 14) and is consequently geohistorically located, thus
shaping a definite knowledge production (Mignolo 2000, 173). More directly
than words, images raise the issue of a biopolitics of language related to
Butler’s notion of precarious lives (Butler 2004) and potently foregrounding
the vulnerable bodies of the migrants. This chapter discusses some of the
leading artists who are visually mapping the forms of migration in Europe.
Through a close reading of some of these works (photographic projects by
Mario De Carolis, Nilüfer Demir, Mario Badagliacca, Rohit Chawla, Kevin
McElvaney; short films by De Luca-Gassmann, Morgan Knibbe, and Andrea
Caccia), the chapter offers an original theory, via translation, of what we do
when we decode an image, especially if it is of someone who looks different
from us. The chapter also investigates the steps of the encoding and decoding
process, expanding the theory introduced by Stuart Hall as to include the
shaping and reshaping of visual messages when they enter the globalized
circulation mediated by social networks.
Chapter 5 brings our reflection full circle and contextualizes our work
as educators in the here and now, caught in-between the discussion of
Brexit, which is currently redrawing the cultural map of Europe, and the
US-Mexico wall, which is conceptually dividing the Americas as they were
never divided before. As academics, we are constantly encouraged to cross
disciplinary borders to access a wider horizon; yet we tend to keep within
the reassuring boundaries of our fields and often prove unable to understand
that, particularly in the humanities, moving beyond the limina is not only
unavoidable, but necessary to the process of understanding the issues of our
time. In concluding our work, we argue that translation grants us “transit
visas” to different cultures, places, and epochs, while training our hearts and
18 The Relocation of Culture

our minds as citizens of the world. A transit visa10 is a powerful image for a
view of translation grounded in stories of migration; it subverts the dynamic
between sameness and otherness, which is often implicit in conventional
views of translation and emphasizes, instead, the foreignness in the receiver
(as the potential traveler). The works that we shall analyze in the chapters that
follow grant us such temporary transit visas: they show us a picture of the
world as heavily translational and send back a picture of ourselves as agents
of translation but also, simultaneously, as translated people.

10
We borrow the metaphor of the transit visa from Ariella Azoulay’s book on photography
as civic contract (Azoulay 2008) and the discussion it generates in Sara Sentilles’s Draw
Your Weapons (Sentilles 2017).
 Part One

Translation as Migration
20
 1

Translation and Worldly Knowledge

Will translation be a keyword for the 21st century? And if so, in what
semantic networks?
—Barbara Godard, “Translation Poetics,” 2003

Historically, how we represent translation prescribes not only how we

collectively imagine national communities and ethnic identities but also
how we relate individually to national sovereignty.
—Naoki Sakai, “Dislocation in Translation,” 2009

1.1 Translation as Worldly Knowledge

In the quotation above, the late Barbara Godard delves into the heart
of the matter for the study of translation today. While it is a fact widely
acknowledged that translation is a keyword of our era, there is no agreement
around the semantic network that defines its study as this has to do both with
the disciplinary location and with the final aim of the branch of translation
studies one embraces: whether it describes the theory or the practice of
translation; whether it deals with written translation or interpreting; whether
it looks at translation diachronically or comparatively; or whether it uses
translation as a metaphor to talk about cultural phenomena or as the method
to study them. The second epigraph by Naoki Sakai, therefore, makes explicit
the larger aim of this chapter—its semantic field so to speak—which is to
discuss the relationship existing between our schemas for understanding
translation and our schemas for understanding the world. Although the
increased visibility of translation studies in the academy has brought with it
a more diversified appraisal of the phenomena surrounding translation (be
they knowledge transmission, cultural diversity, epistemological difference,
language domination and language loss, issues of global justice, or global
22 The Relocation of Culture

aesthetics), not much has changed in the way translation is conceived of,
learned, and taught. The field remains prevalently language- and text-centric
and based on European theories developed in the 1970s and early 1980s in
need of review and updating (Gentzler 2017, 1).
In our understanding, translation indicates much more than mechanical
processes of transferring concepts and texts from one language, literary or
cultural tradition, to another on an illusionary horizontal plan of equity
and equivalence. Rather, translation also speaks of the many and diverse life
experiences of people who move individually or collectively across borders,
and therefore it needs to be understood beyond the linguistic and textual
dimensions. Thus, the study of translation through the lens of migration
allows us to close the gap that is often left open between our experience of
the world and the abstract categories through which we make sense of that
experience. Translation is here posited not as an action to be performed or a
skill to be learned but as a condition of living—temporary or permanent—
and a way to see the world, that is a form of “worldly knowledge” à la Said.
This is the way we decline translation: as a foundational epistemological and
communicative mode, a condition of living, and as one of the most important
processes that train us to become cultural agents.
In his book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, David Bellos offers an impassioned
defense of the centrality of translation in the history of human civilizations.
Translation, Bellos argues, is not a secondary activity of human culture
located in a little invisible corner of the universe. It is placed right at the
center of a civilization where it illustrates what it means to have a language
and to use a language. It is the living, malleable matter of cultural production,
change, and survival. Linguistic diversity is the nature of language, not its
aberration, and even less a curse, like in the biblical story of the Tower of
Babel (Bellos 2011, 335–8). And that is because languages—as we shall see in
Chapter 2 in the case of Caribbean creole languages—lead plurilingual lives:
they change, live, and die in constant contact, or war, with other idioms. Seen
from this angle, the idea that translation can and should be studied through
the lens of migration emerges, not as a trendy metaphor, but as a necessary
conceptual framework to discuss the globalized and multilingual world in
which we operate. Therefore, in this chapter we ask what new knowledge can
be gained if we rethink translation outside the usual dichotomies of native
language/homeland versus foreign language/homeland, and we imagine a
new schema of translation premised on the acknowledgment that we live in
heavily translational cultures and most peoples, very likely, always have. In
this way, as Gentzler notes, the collective experiences of migrants, immigrants,
and displaced people that have dominated the news and political discussion
in the first two decades of this millennium shift from the margins to the
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 23

very center of the cultural discussion as issues of adaptation, assimilation,

and resistance are acknowledged as defining traits of contemporary cultures
(Gentzler 2017, 7–8).
This chapter begins with an exploration of the schemas through which
we usually understand translation and ends by proposing a model of
translation that takes the diverse lived experience of relocated people as its
starting point. It considers what happens if we decline translation as worldly
knowledge in terms of how we construct the categories and the methods of
our scholarship. The link between translation and migration offers an ideal
test case to imagine a theory of translation that starts from the ground up and
aims at establishing what we call a “translation literacy” through the close-
reading sections of the next chapters.

1.2 Translation as Migration: A New Schema

In the dynamic field of translation studies, the metaphoricity of the nexus

between translation and migration has grown exponentially and has been
studied by scholars within the field but also, and increasingly, by scholars
in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and literary theory. As Loredana
Polezzi writes, “[T]he popularity of the link is in itself revealing: it underlines
the increased centrality of migration and of translation (as notions as well as
practices) […]; and it foregrounds the suggestive as well as anxiety-inducing
nature of any interweaving of the two” (345). The descriptor “translated
people” (Rushdie 1991, 17) has prophetically stretched to symbolize the
condition of an ever-increasing number of subjects of different kinds, from
common travelers to work migrants, from cosmopolitan globe-trotters to
immigrants, from asylum seekers to deportees. By connecting the act of
translation to the physical movement of people, Rushdie was pointing to
a simple yet important fact. It is not only texts, ideas, and languages that
are translated, but human beings, too. And this, as many scholars are now
saying,1 is a key factor for a translation studies approach to migration as
it radically changes how we think about the work of translation and the
discipline. Polezzi, from whose work we draw extensively, highlights the
ethical dimension implicit in this shift of perspective:

1
Some of the scholars who have responded to the ethical challenge implicit in the
translation-migration dyad include Inghilleri, Mezzadra and Neilson, Vallorani, Di
Maio, Polezzi, Gentzler, and Hedge.
24 The Relocation of Culture

If we take into account people rather than, or at least as well as, texts, then
the implications of “translating” them necessarily foreground ethical
questions: there is, after all, a crucial difference between “manipulating”,
“domesticating” or even “betraying” a literary work and doing the same
with a human being.
(Polezzi 2012, 347)

In Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies, Edwin

Gentzler suggests a method for what he calls post-translation studies that goes
beyond the analysis of textual matter and explores, instead, the pre- and post-
conditions of translation, that is, all the variables that affect translative events
in the diverse environments in which they occur (Gentzler 2017, 2–4). In his
words, “What if translation became viewed less as a temporal act to be carried
out between languages and cultures and instead as a precondition underlying the
languages and cultures upon which communication is based?” (Gentzler 2017,
5). Given the fact that the questions posed by a migration-oriented theory of
translation (how is translation conceived of by the people who have relocated
into new places?; how is translation experienced by those who live translated
lives?; how are human beings translated?; who are or can be translators?2) do
not find answers in conventional models of translation, it might indeed be
useful to follow Gentzler’s invitation and approach the discourse on translation
from outside of the discipline to better analyze the translational phenomena as
they occur and to develop a model that can account for them.
Another scholar who has recently problematized the conventional terms
with which we conceptualize translation is Naoki Sakai. His starting point is
that translation always implies a worldly and comparative view of knowledge:

Translation is not secondary or derivative to meaning or language;

it is just as fundamental or foundational in any attempt to elucidate
these concepts. Translation indicates the trace of contact with the
incomprehensible, the unknowable, or the unfamiliar, that is with the
foreign, and there is no awareness of language or meaning until we come
across the foreign.
(Sakai 2009, 170)

Let’s compare Sakai’s view with the commonly held second-order label cast
on translation in the following quotation from David Bellos:

2
An excellent analysis of the existential condition of translators in war settings is provided
in Vicente Rafael’s “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of
Empire.” Social Text, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2009): 1–23.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 25

It’s a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original.

It’s also perfectly obvious that this is wrong. Translations are
substitutes for original texts. You use them in the place of a work written
in a language you cannot read with ease.
(Bellos 2011, 37, emphasis added)

What Sakai defines as the “ancien régime” of the study of translation

(exemplified in the first part of Bellos’s quotation above) finds its origin in
the modern nation-state and its invention of “countable national languages,
languages as individual units that can be isolated and juxtaposed like apples,
for example, and unlike water” (Sakai 2009, 170). According to this model, for
instance, the Creole continuum could be imagined as a “water language”—an
image that captures well the fluidity that characterizes language use in the
Caribbean as we shall see in Chapter 2. In particular, the modern schema
of co-figuration commonly applied to translation—whereby translation
identifies a linear transfer of meaning between two clearly demarcated unities
of ethnic and national languages—is directly associated with the image of
the world it presupposes and conveys, i.e., as an international agglomerate of
distinct nations (Sakai 2009, 169). In other words, a shared modern regime
of co-figured, standardized, and nationalized languages is co-terminous
with a regime of translation as “an institutionalized assemblage of protocols,
rules of conduct, canons of accuracy and ways of viewing” (Sakai 2009, 172,
emphasis added). Thus, the model of separate and distinct languages that
Sakai outlines is the apparatus that also allows us to imagine or represent what
happens in translation; it provides us with an image or representation (Sakai
2009b, 75)—a theory—of translation. There are two main lessons that can be
extracted from Sakai’s analysis:

i. The representation (or schema) of translation has not only replaced

actualized translation—or translation as a pre-condition of our life in
language—but also prescribed the conventional way of seeing languages
and cultures as neatly distinct and separate, with contact or translation
zones othered as areas of exception or aberration, a description that
misreads and mystifies the way in which we experience culture in our
world and erases linguistic diversity as a meaningful and real cultural
experience.
ii. Translation, as a condition as well as a form of knowledge, even within
what Sakai calls the “ancien régime” of translation studies, has always
been, and can only be, worldly as it moves from the consciousness of the
familiar and the local toward the (awe-inspiring or anxiety-producing)
unfamiliar and foreign.
26 The Relocation of Culture

The notion of translation as worldly culture attaches itself to a robust

line of thinking that approaches the study of “the contemporary” from
the vantage point of the aftermath of European colonialism and that deals
explicitly with the issue of translation: Said (1993), Bhabha (1994, 2004,
2018), Spivak (2012), Chakrabarty (2000), Mezzadra (2008), Mignolo
(2012), Sommer (2004), Rafael (2005), Santos (2014) are just some of the
most prominent names that have made this subfield. Starting from their
work, the reflection on translation as the location, or articulation, of a non-
national idea of culture has become central in translation studies, literary
studies, and postcolonial studies. In its earlier definition, cultural translation
emerged as the modus operandi of postcolonial and diasporic cultures,
cultures that can be pictured as translations with no retrievable originals
and whose system of values is caught in a wandering status between the
precolonial, the colonial, and postcolonial or diasporic orders of knowledge
and existence.
The term relocation, in its current usage in relation to migration, gives us
an ideal semantic field within which to discuss translation in historical and
material terms without forgetting, however, that experiences of migration
are always plural and diverse. Relocation is in fact commonly used to refer
to the redistribution of migrants in so-called receiving nations, but it also
indicates the material experiences lived by people who have crossed national
borders and are being relocated; therefore it needs to be understood in
its double signification of control and hospitality—on the one hand as a
form of containment and policing and, on the other, as a form of assimilation,
articulation, and agency. If we apply the traditional schema of translation to
migration, we get an image of (passive) migrants requiring translation, in
space, time, and language or culture. However, if we consider translation
through the lens of migration itself, the linear notion of translation as
something that happens between two discreet linguistic and cultural units
reveals itself to be inadequate because it does not account for the diversity
of the migrant experience. People decide to leave their homeland for a
multiplicity of reasons and with very diverse means; hopefully they arrive
safely and are accepted into a new place and, in a sense, cease existing as
“translated people.” They in fact shift from a passive to an active translation
status—though that necessary legal passage is crucial—and start translating
for themselves and their groups. Individual agency is crucial when we think
translation through the lens of migration: migrants become/act as translators
in their new communities, in informal daily exchanges, or in important life-
changing exchanges with the immigration or health systems as we shall
see in the section dedicated to Valeria Luiselli’s essay Tell Me How It Ends.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 27

Taking migration into consideration, as Polezzi insightfully argues, forces

us to ask not just what translation is, but also who the translator is or who
could become one (Polezzi 2012, 348–9). These are important questions that
remain unanswered within the “ancien régime” of translation studies but that
lie at the core of the translation and migration stories of our times. It is not an
accident in fact that the fascination with translation and language diversity
has become a steady feature of contemporary globalized culture, from
cinema to literature to music and the arts, and promises to become a central
focus of scholarship in the years to come. In our role as cultural critics, we
can begin to contribute to this new scholarship by studying the forms and
the tropes through which translation and migration manifest themselves on
the cultural front.
In her powerful book Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles reflects on art
and violence and on the ways in which images—particularly documentary
photographs—affect us or change the way we see the world. “Photographs,”
she writes, “allow viewers to be somewhere they could not otherwise be, to
see what would otherwise remain invisible. The theorist Ariella Azoulay calls
photographs ‘transit visas,’ and […] she insists the camera grants a kind of
citizenship that transcends borders” (Sentilles 2017, 187–9). At the core of
Sentilles’s scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating
the roles that language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, and
social transformation, and she advocates for what she calls “a visual literacy,”
that is, a pedagogical project that questions received ways of seeing and puts
the emphasis on the viewer’s agency. Sentilles’s project, especially her analysis
of our ability to respond as well as our responsibility as viewers, aligns with
the preoccupation with a “translation literacy” that we are articulating in
this book.
Our intention is to read the translational side of the world, outside of
what Chaudhury calls the unilingualism and the monosemy of the mind
that European colonialism has exported across the world (Chaudhury 1999,
68). As Harish Trivedi argues in “In Our Own Time, on Our Own Terms,”
translation, as it is understood in the West, arrived in India with colonization
(Trivedi 2006, 102–3). However, there are innumerable aspects of Indian
culture that can be described as translational but that remain unaccounted
for according to the colonial or Western translation schema. It all depends
on how one looks. Indeed, there are many aspects of our own cultures that
could be seen as translational when we know how to look. Like photographs,
translations grant us transit visas to different cultures, places, and epochs,
while training our hearts and our minds as citizens of the world. Through
a close reading of works by Emily Jacir and Valeria Luiselli, in this chapter
28 The Relocation of Culture

we articulate the possibility of a translation literacy as a responsible way of

reading migration stories.

1.3 A Mediterranean Via Crucis

Born in Palestine, raised and educated between Rome, Ramallah, and

New York, Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre that explores
translation, mobility, resistance, and cultural erasure in the Mediterranean
region. Her work investigates personal and collective movement and its
implications on the physical and social experience of trans-Mediterranean
space and time, in particular between Italy and Palestine, her two homelands.
Her work has received many accolades and awards, but it has also met with
protests and censorship.3 Starting with her 2003 installation “Translate
Allah,” in the aftermath of September 11, covering the Queen’s Museum of
Art building in New York City, we can follow Jacir’s attempt to read the world
around us through translation. Translate Allah has been widely analyzed by
several scholars, Emily Apter in particular (Apter 2006, 2013), in relation
to the study of translation in a cultural and interlingual framework. The
two pieces by Jacir that we want to discuss, instead, capture translation as
a way of living and knowing, have a Mediterranean context of reference,
and were created in response to the global discourse around the “migration
crisis”: Stazione (2009) was prepared for the 53rd Venice Biennale, and Via
Crucis (2016) is a permanent installation in Milan, inside the Chiesa di
San Raffaele.
Stazione was created for Palestine c/o Venice, a side event of the Venice
Biennale in 2009. Jacir translated each of the twenty-four stops of the
vaporetto along the crowded Linea 1, going from Piazzale Roma and Santa
Lucia along the Grand Canal to Rialto and San Marco (Figure 1.1).
Venice is a translational city. It is the city where the first Jewish ghetto
was instituted in 15164 and where the word ghetto originates, where street

3
Emily Jacir is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Golden Lion at the
52nd Venice Biennale (2007), a Prince Claus Award (2007), the Hugo Boss Prize (2008),
the Herb Alpert Award (2011), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize
Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015) (https://darjacir.com/Team).
4
The word ghetto initially referred to the copper foundry of the Venetian government, il
ghetto (sometimes spelled gheto, getto, or geto) where cannon balls were cast, from the
root gettare, to cast or to throw. Established by decree of Doge Leonardo Loredan on
March 29, 1516, the ghetto became the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed quarter to
which all the Jews in Venice were relegated because of religious difference.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 29

Figure 1.1 Emily Jacir, Stazione, 2009.

names are painted on nizioleti (tiny sheets) in Venetian dialect on the walls
of the buildings, and it is the only European city that has an Arabic name:
Al-bunduqiyya. According to the Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego, there is
a metropolitan legend surrounding its origin:

Bunduqīyya in Arabic means “gun”, “rifle”, or even “bullets”. The common

belief is that Venice was given this name because of its important role as
a centre of production and distribution of firearms. However, the word
bunduqīyya has been used to refer to firearms only after the fourteenth
century, whereas Venice was called Bunduqīyya in much earlier days.
The metropolitan legend, therefore, seems to have little credibility, if any.
But Lord, how fascinating!
(Scego 2013, 2)
30 The Relocation of Culture

Jacir’s intention was to create a bilingual network of transport through the

city, and the words in Arabic were meant to unearth and visualize the shared
hidden history of Venice and Palestine—Palestine c/o Venice—and reclaim
Venice’s Arab cultural heritage. In her words: “Addressing this rendered
invisibility, my project aims to remind visitors and citizens of Venice, not
only of its deep and varied cultural origins, exchanges and influences but also
of possible futures of exchange” (Jacir 2011).
The project also entailed the printing of a trilingual map (in Italian,
Arabic, and English), inscribed within the comprehensive map of the public
transportation system. Before the opening of the biennale, the Venice
Transport Consortium (ACTV, or Azienda Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano)
revoked the authorization without explanation. The artist was not allowed
to issue a statement for the cancelation of the event; she was only allowed
to add the writing “THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN CANCELLED” to the
trilingual maps of the city, which had been printed for distribution. The artist
comments on the events:

My work was completely secular, addressing cultural exchange between

Venice and the Arab world. I really don’t think the fact that I am a
Palestinian was the issue in Venice … I think it is more likely that the
work was being presented in the public realm, in the streets of Venice,
and not being confined to a designated “art” space … I do believe that the
Arabic script was a problem … When Arabic crawls out of … borders …
and becomes part of the cityscape … perhaps this was the very thing that
was so threatening to them.
(Jacir 2011)

Jacir’s idea to use the material translation of the stops of the vaporetto to
invite her audience on a journey along the Grand Canal, zigzagging from
one bank to the other, and reactivating lost associations, forgotten exchanges,
disclaimed heritages is particularly ingenious and adds an unearthing element
to the translation as migration nexus. During the boat ride, in fact, borders
are crossed multiple times and translations occur; however, translation is also
the movement from one bank to the other of the Canal and, by extension,
the Mediterranean. If “untranslatability” has emerged in recent years as a key
concept in discussions of cultural translation (Apter 2013), in Jacir’s work,
it is shown to be less about an incommensurable distance between cultures
and more about the political friction at play. The artist’s antidote to political
untranslatability is to take the understanding into our own hands, as translated
and translating people, by getting on board the vaporetto and seeing Venice/
Al-bunduqiyya, first from one bank of the Grand Canal and then from the
opposite one.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 31

In 2016 Jacir recreated a Mediterranean Via Crucis in a small church in

the very center of Milan to contemplate the current refugee and migrant
crisis, which, as Chapters 3 and 4 of this book show, urgently calls for a
redefinition of European culture. Like Stazione, this project tells its story
through travel and translation, and it establishes an important link between
the shared legacies of Italy—as the country that hosts the Catholic Church’s
state—and Palestine, as the place of origin of many of the relics found in
Italian churches. The translatio of relics from the Holy Land provides the
first translational palimpsest through which we approach this installation,
which, in line with Jacir’s previous work, can be described as translation art.
The second translational palimpsest is religious—the Via Crucis, which is
chosen as the narrative device for the composition. The story is told through
large rounds of steel placed above square- or rectangle-shaped glass cases
containing the objects from Palestine. The story begins at the top of the left
nave, below the altar steps, with the first seven stations of the cross identified
in Arabic to resume, symmetrically, on the right side of the altar, with stations
VIII through XIV signaled in Italian.5
This is the full scheme of the composition:

I – ‫[ يسوع محكوم عليه بالموت‬Yasue VIII – Gesù incontra le donne di

mahkum ealayh bialmawt]/ Gerusalemme/Jesus meets the
Jesus is condemned to death. women of Jerusalem
Keys from Palestinian homes Piece of traditional Jerusalem
Nakba. woman’s dress (embroidered in
Bethlehem 120 years ago).
II‫[ يسوع حامل الصليبية على منكبية‬Yasue Tears. Resistance.
hamil salibiat ealaa mankibia]/
Jesus carries his cross IX – Gesù cade per la terza volta/
Valise Jesus falls for the third time
Disposession. Exile. Cement
The Apartheid Wall.
III – ‫يسوع ساقط تحت الصليب للمرة‬
‫[ االولى‬Yasue saqitanaan taht X – Gesù è spogliato delle
aslib lilmarih al’uwlaa]/Jesus vesti/Jesus is stripped of his
falls for the first time garments
Barbed wire from West Bank Olive wood from Bayt Jalla
Occupation. Separation. 800,000 trees. And more. Uprooted.
Destroyed.
5
We would like to thank Federico Pozzoli, doctoral student in Humanities at the
Università degli Studi di Milano, and Soukaina Tarraf, MA student in Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies at the University of Louisville, for their help transcribing and
interpreting the Arabic portion of Jacir’s work.
32 The Relocation of Culture

IV –‫[ يسوع ملتقيا بأمه الحزينة‬Yasue XI – Gesù è inchiodato sulla

multaqiaan bi’amih alhazina]/ croce/Jesus is nailed to the
Jesus meets his mother cross.
Glass cast in Venice M16 shells from the West Bank
The sea. Violence.
V –‫وقد اعانه هنا سمعان القيرواني على حمل‬
XII – Gesù muore sulla croce/
‫[ الصليب‬Waqd ‘aeanah huna samean
Jesus dies on the cross.
alqiriwani ealaa hamal alsalib]/
Fishing nets from Gazan
Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry
fishermen
the cross
3 km perimeter. Forbidden.
Piece from fisherman’s boat from Gaza
Vittorio Arrigoni.
XIII – Gesù è deposto dalla croce/
VI –‫مسحة هنا وجه اليسوع القديسة ڤيرونيكة‬ Jesus is taken down from the
[Msihat huna wajhah alqadisat cross.
vyrwnyka]/V eronica wipes the Keffiye from Hebron
face of Jesus Shroud.
Photograph from Bethlehem
(circa1915) XIV – Il corpo di Gesù è deposto
Lampedusa. Lost photographs. nel sepolcro/Jesus is laid in the
tomb.
VII –‫اليسوع وقع هنا تحت الصليب للمرة‬
Slayeb stone from Bayt Jalla
‫[ الثانية‬waqae huna taht alsalib
Right to be buried in our
lilmarat althania]/Jesus fall the
homeland.
second time
Palestine.
Iron rusting
Political prisoners. Child prisoners.
Prisoners
“Iron always rusts.”

The iconic correlation of station to object makes this installation moving

and compelling: the first station (Jesus is condemned to death) (Figure 1.2)
showcases a tangle of rusty keys to recall the image of Palestinian homes
abandoned during the Nakba in 1972. A symbol both of an exile/death
sentence and of the hope of a return to the homeland, the abandoned key
is turned into an equally powerful symbol of dispossession and longing for
belonging for displaced people throughout history.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 33

Figure 1.2 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

34 The Relocation of Culture

The second station (Jesus carries his cross) (Figure 1.3) shows the first tool
of all journeys: in a small glass square case a leather suitcase is so crumpled
as to be unrecognizable. The icon for the third station (Jesus falls for the first
time) is a crown made of barbed wire from the West Bank. In Station IV (Jesus
meets his mother), a glossy tile of azure glass blown in Venice recalls the color

Figure 1.3 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 35

of Mary’s veil in western iconography. The semi-circle begins with the rusty
“keys from Palestinian homes” and ends with a tile of rusty iron in Station
VII: Jesus falls for the second time. A slab of rusty iron. Political prisoners,
children prisoners. Prisoners, and the caption: “iron always rusts” (Figure 1.4).6

Figure 1.4 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

6
The quoted captions are contained in Translatio, the book authored by Emily Jacir, John
Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt that accompanies the installation. It has no page
numbers. See bibliography for full reference.
36 The Relocation of Culture

This is “a story told in things,” John Lansdowne writes in Translatio,

the collaborative book that accompanies the installation, inspired by the
medieval tradition of collecting and displaying the relics of saints brought
from Palestine in Italian churches (Lansdowne 2016, 11). There are so
many layers of symbolism to be unpacked, starting from the matching of
the language script with the direction of the narrative and the physical
movement of the Via Crucis (the stations in Arabic script proceed
anticlockwise in the left nave and the stations in Italian clockwise in the
right nave of the church), to the evocation of places and communities
through elaborate artifacts or, instead, through materials such as iron,
cement, marble, wood, glass. Jacir’s relics are, in many cases, the things
left behind—the literal meaning of relic—as in Station VI where a water-
damaged photograph is showcased and connected to the stories of
migration that the Mediterranean Sea has witnessed from Bethlehem to
Lampedusa, or in Station XI in which spent M16 shells collected in the
West Bank are displayed to form an artistic symmetry. As Lansdowne
points out, the “thinginess” (Lansdowne 2016, 9) of Jacir’s objects is perhaps
stronger in the artifacts created for the installation, because the materials
she chooses—the piece of olive wood, marble as part of the land, cement,
iron—do not by themselves convey sacredness until they are invested with
the cultural terms that make them unique. The last station, the one that
commemorates Jesus being laid in the sepulcher, for instance, is a slab of
red slayeb marble from Bayt Jalla, from the quarries now inaccessible to
the local Christian community since they have been incorporated into the
Israeli settlement of Gilo (MacEvitt 2016, 107–8). The red and bloody color
of the marble associated with the caption in the book—Right to be buried
in our homeland. Palestine—is particularly touching for a modern viewer
(See Figure 1.5).
Jacir’s stations are iconoclastic, an oxymoron in terms of figuration, as
they speak of people without showing them and intensely evoke places
through the materials, the crafts, the techniques with which they were
created. As the viewer has to make an effort to decipher some of the objects
given the position of the stations and the paucity of light in the church or
to connect them with the religious narrative of the Via Crucis, the viewer
turns into a pilgrim moving from station to station. In its origins, the Via
Crucis was meant to be “a pilgrimage by proxy” (Lansdowne 2016, 12) for
all the Christians who could not go to Jerusalem and worship at the actual
places through which Jesus had carried the cross. In other words, the Via
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 37

Figure 1.5 Emily Jacir, Via Crucis, 2016.

38 The Relocation of Culture

Crucis translated Jerusalem to Italy so that would-be pilgrims could worship.

Even today, the Way of the Cross creates a physical space for prayer and
meditation in commemoration of Christ’s Passion and crucifixion, but also a
space to think about and initiate action, and Jacir’s stations add an extra layer
to the meditation that becomes simultaneously intimate and spiritual or
religious, social and historical. For the Catholics who pray in this church, this
is the Way of the Cross, their pilgrimage by proxy, as there are no indications
that this is an art installation;7 however, with half the station titles written
in Arabic and half in Italian, it functions, properly, as a translation while
simultaneously posing the question: which is the original? The fact that Via
Crucis speaks its message of adoration and devotion through translation is
what moves us to a halt. The Passion of Christ is represented through the
contemporary passion of Palestinians as well as of all the people displaced
from their homes. Migrants, Jacir seems to be saying, are today’s Christs, but
who are they saving? What is palpably absent is the idea of Jesus’s salvific
suffering that turns the passion into the powerful metaphor of redemption
that it is for Christians. Yet the question is looming and permeates the viewer’s
experience. What is certain is that suffering of this scale and proportion,
which the installation in its overpowering materiality emphasizes, cannot
escape the viewer.
Translatio is the term used to describe the transfer of a saint’s body or a
relic from one place to another. When relics were acquired and “translated”
to Italy, thanks to the will of important patrons such as Saint Helena
(Emperor Constantine’s mother) or Theodelinda (Queen of the Lombards),
the churches in which they were placed were renamed as the relics’ presence
gave them a new meaning and function (Lansdowne 2016, 13). Good
examples of this, as Lansdowne points out, both in Rome, are the Basilica
Herulaem, which is today Santa Croce di Gerusalemme, and Santa Maria
Maggiore, which is today Santa Maria ad Praesepe. In Via Crucis, Jacir is the
translator, she is the agent of the translatio of secular relics, and she brings
or recreates them, for people to see, worship, and meditate on. How do
these relics change the meaning and function of the church in which they
are placed? San Raffaele is considered as one of Milan’s minor churches,
built in the late sixteenth century in proximity to the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore, today known as the Duomo, and is so tightly squeezed in between
the glittering Rinascente shopping mall and the majestic cathedral merely
steps away that it can very easily be overlooked. Indeed, the marginal status

7
The church of San Raffaele is associated to a cultural center by the same name and
regularly houses artists’ collections and installations.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 39

of the church in which the installation is located seems to mirror and call
attention to the invisible status of migrants and their suffering, which is the
subject of the installation itself. The contrast, as often happens with Jacir’s
art, is powerful and arresting.8
Like in Stazione, Jacir insists on the deep historical and cultural ties
connecting Italy and Palestine, but at the center of this work is not the
history of Milan, rather it is the Palestinians’ forced exile, placed side by
side with the sufferings of today’s migrants, presented as different facets of
the same martyrdom. Translation as a mode of understanding the world
allows Jacir to turn the tables on the standard narrative of migration given
in political discourse and circulated by the media: the story of migration
is told from the point of view of the people who have left the keys to
their homes behind, the ornate dresses, their mothers, their children
captured or hunted down by M16s, or who have lost photographs in the
Mediterranean Sea. This is the story of migration that Jacir bears witness
to, and translation—or rather translatio—provides the language for the
story to be told.

1.4 Translating Right(s) at Entry Point

Moving from the fourteen stations of Jacir’s Mediterranean Via Crucis to

the forty questions of the intake questionnaire for child asylum seekers in
Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli, which describes a pan-American
Via Dolorosa, the transition is disturbingly seamless. However, while Jacir’s
ingenious use of the trope of the translatio of relics puts the emphasis on
the “migrational” aspect of translation, Luiselli’s book looks at a key location
where translation and migration meet, the immigration court system; this is
where translation is directly connected to migrants’ lives. Tell Me How It Ends
collects the Mexican American writer and essayist Valeria Luiselli’s reflections
on the screening sessions of child asylum seekers after they have crossed the
US-Mexico border and on her role as a volunteer translator-interpreter for
the New York court system. This extremely readable 120-page long essay is
formatted after the questionnaire the court uses to interview the children. It
was met with great success when it was published in 2017 at the height of the
immigration crisis on US soil: a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award in Criticism in 2017, it was also adopted as common reading in some

8
We would like to thank Pamela Beattie for bringing this parallelism to our attention.
40 The Relocation of Culture

General Education programs in colleges across the United States.9 Tell Me

How It Ends has achieved a visibility and won accolades that are inversely
proportional to what is perceived as the dominant political rhetoric of
migration in the United States, and this fact alone is worthy of notice. Some
reviewers state that it has “opened doors” to the discussion of the migrant
crisis in American society in “new terms” (de León 2019), and in fact Luiselli’s
intent was to reframe the way we think and talk about migration by taking
a hemispheric—this is one of the new terms she proposes—approach and
digging into the historical, political, and cultural context of the current crisis.
Situations of interpreting within the immigration court system represent
translation—understood as linguistic and cultural transfer—in action and
provide an ideal test case for the argument developed in this chapter about
the inadequacy of linguistic schemas of translation to account for the full
complexity of the fact of translation. In fact, when we start taking into
account people rather than texts, the ethical implications of translation
are suddenly foregrounded. In her study of the conditions of interpreting
within the asylum-seeking legal process, Moira Inghilleri emphasizes the
active role played by interpreters and translators, a role almost as important
as that played by immigration officers, even though the public and media
perception seem to ignore or belittle their essential contribution. By law,
asylum seekers are to be provided with an interpreter before a formal
interview with an immigration officer can be conducted, and Luiselli’s
essay details the risky process through which the information is collected
and organized prior to a formal hearing within the US immigration system.
The year of the events described in Luiselli’s essay is 2015, when the
numbers of migrants are, according to the UN, at their highest, and when
the dominant rhetoric surrounding migration in the United States invokes
the same trope of a fortress invaded and under siege that is circulating in
Europe. By organizing her essay around the forty questions of the intake
questionnaire, Luiselli leaves this polarizing rhetoric behind and directs the
reader’s attention to the actual vocabulary of immigration, its underlying
assumptions, and its current usage: screening, for instance, is the term used for
the interviews; aliens is the legal term for non-citizens; removal the word for
deportation; sending countries are opposed to receiving countries, etc. Behind
these words a precise image of the world materializes: it is the world as an

9
We are indebted for this information to Hilary Levinson’s reflection on her own
experience at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Common Book Program, a program
that distributes the selected book among its first-year students. It also invites the wider
Richmond community to read it since the author is invited to campus for a public
lecture. Another notable book in recent years that has had a similar success and General
Education trajectory is Citizen by Claudia Rankine published in 2014.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 41

international agglomerate of distinct nations that Sakai discusses in his work.

In her signature incisive manner, Luiselli draws attention to the world view
behind the words: “The intake questionnaire for undocumented children
[…] reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality. It reads as if it had been
written in high definition, and as you make your way down its forty questions
it’s impossible not to feel that the world has become a much more fucked-up
place than anyone could have ever imagined” (Luiselli 2017, 10).
The language of the current immigration systems is not the language of
“universal hospitality” invoked by Kant in Perpetual Peace (Kant 1795/1957,
20).10 Since the terrorist attacks in 2001 and the global war on terror, in fact, it
has been transformed into the language of homeland security, protection, and
control of the nation’s entry points. We need to only look at the news and see
the images of the detention/hospitality centers designed to contain migrants
and refugee seekers and separate them from the rest of the population to
bring this point home. However, for lack of better words, interpreters self-
consciously negotiate this vocabulary in their job every day. They are aware
that the interviews they translate at the early point in the process are highly
significant and can determine the final outcome of the migrants’ cases; they
participate in the excluding practices of screening through which nation-
states exert their control over those who demand entrance while, on the
other hand, they bear witness to the stories of the migrants and provide a
form of real hospitality, linguistic and cultural, that is crucial in the process
(Inghilleri 2012, 76–8).
Luiselli’s book sheds some much-needed light onto interpreting as a
crucial aspect of the legal migration process while also underscoring the
necessity of reviewing the schemas behind translation and, by extension,
interpreting through which we operate. The opposition often drawn
between interpreting and advocacy when migrants come face to face with
legal institutions is a case in point, as Loredana Polezzi notes (Polezzi 2012,
349). This opposition is artificial at best and misleading at its core since it
does not consider how mediation works, simplifying a process that is, in
reality, very complex and fraught with potentially consequential errors.
Within the prevalent skills-based approach, interpreters are imagined as
passive “conduits” of information (Inghilleri 2012, 85), and migrants are
“translated” between places and cultures, with no attention given to the
active role of participants in the interpreting event, that is, the intricate social,

10
Several scholars have highlighted, by referring to Hannah Arendt’s work, how the case of
asylum seekers explodes the logic of possibility of the nation-state and its association of
rights with citizenship. See Giorgio Agamben (1998, 126–35), Loredana Polezzi (2012,
353–3), Homi Bhabha (NEMLA Keynote, Washington, DC, March 22, 2019).
42 The Relocation of Culture

ideological, and emotional components that inform the communicative

exchange at entry points. Luiselli showcases the interpreter’s dilemma:

But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths
of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with
hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them
into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children’s
stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair
of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it
has no beginning, no middle, and no end.
(Luiselli 2017, 7)

Tell Me How It Ends explodes the conduit schema of interpreting by

describing the difficulty and at times impossibility of translating the words of
the children she interviews who often cannot understand the questions they
are being asked: “[I]nterpreters have to reconfigure the questions, shift them
from the language of adults to the language of children, breaking the intake
questions up in smaller phrases until she finds a way to connect with the
children” (Luiselli 2017, 63). In making the interpreter’s role fully visible and
acknowledging its importance but also its challenges, Luiselli shows what a
migration-based approach to translation (and interpreting) has to offer: a
recognition of the ethical dimension of any translational encounter.
As an immigrant to the United States, Luiselli reflects on the
incommensurable distance between her own process of immigration and her
status as a “permanent resident” and that of the children she is screening.
She is both translated and translator, mirroring the common experience of
immigrant children who become the official interpreters for their families. In
other words, Luiselli shows the multilayered notion of agency that is a crucial
part of the translational phenomena surrounding migration, and she does
it through her metalinguistic musings about her exchanges with the young
migrants. Once again, the traditional schema of translation with its idealized
view of homolingual speakers and enunciation, and of interpreters as passive
conduits of transfer, proves sorely inadequate to represent translation as it
lives and is lived in contexts of migration.
As in the case of Via Crucis and Stazione by Jacir, translation constitutes
the subject matter of this book, but also, beautifully, it constitutes its form.
Tell Me How It Ends fully participates in the genre of testimonial texts,11
11
We would like to thank Hilary Levison for pointing out the connection between
translation and testimonial writing at the 2019 ACLA annual convention held at
Georgetown University. See her “Disturbing Translations: Distance, Memory, and
Representation in Contemporary.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015.
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 43

texts that can be seen as translations, or versions, of original stories, stories

that would be lost without translation. Writing about AIDS narratives, Ross
Chambers describes these texts as relays, as they

imply or make use of a metaphor of relay in their account of what the

writing of testimonial entails, or they employ other metaphors suggestive
of portability such as reporting or fostering. Such tropes describe the
witnessing writer as a mediating agent, connecting or attempting to
(re)connect those who cannot speak (the dead) and those (the living)
who seem oblivious to their fate, as if it were not relevant to them.
(Chambers 2004, 37)

Even though the children are alive and not dead, like in most testimonial
writing, the book is explicit about its witnessing function: “Telling stories
doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t reassemble broken lives. But perhaps it is a way
of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to
ourselves, in silence, replaying it in the silence while we shower, while we walk
alone down streets, or in our moments of insomnia” (Luiselli 2017, 69–70).
Following the rhetoric of testimonial writing, which entails a de-authorization
of the author, Luiselli’s book lists the questions one by one, commenting on
the typology of answers they elicit and on the words that are repeated in the
exchanges and that we learn to understand as we read (coyotes, pandrilleros,
La Bestia, the hielera, La Migra), as in the example below where two little
sisters from Guatemala, aged five and seven, are being screened:

Why did you come to the United States?

I don’t know.
How did you travel here?
A man brought us.
A coyote?
No, a man.
Was he nice to you?
Yes, he was nice, I think.
And where did you cross the border?
I don’t know.
Texas? Arizona?
Yes! Texas Arizona.
(Luiselli 2017, 55–6)

Stealing a sad smile from the reader, Luiselli shows how complicated things
are when lives are being translated into a place that does not seem to want
44 The Relocation of Culture

them. The fear of saying the wrong thing or getting in trouble often determines
the wrong answers, and by recording them Luiselli points to the paradox of
the interpreter’s predicament: the correct answers to the questionnaire are
those that as a human being she would not want to hear as they refer to
the violent circumstances the children are fleeing, yet they are those that she
dutifully records and conveys to the lawyers because she knows that they can
“strengthen” the children’s cases:

Thirty-nine: “Are you scared to return?” In this same conversation,

Alina also tells me that she brought the girls over after some pandrilleros
from the gang that killed Manu’s friend started waiting outside her
eldest daughter’s school every day, following her slowly back home on
motorbikes as she walked along the side of the road, trying not to look
back.
Up until then, the idea of letting the children travel alone with a
coyote had been unimaginable—crossing borders, mounting La Bestia.
Suddenly the idea of allowing them to stay in Tegucigalpa became even
more unimaginable.
(Luiselli 2017, 89)

According to the UN statistics, the numbers of global migrants were at their

highest before the Covid-19 pandemic. However, numbers and maps do not
convey the horror that is taking place on this continent with the same impact
as images and stories. Hearing and recording the children’s stories has been
Luiselli’s act of witnessing; ours is the act of reading. Translation understood
as an act of witnessing, as we have seen in this chapter, is only imaginable
through a schema of translation that strives to make the complexity of the
world visible and audible.
Both artists discussed in this chapter make visible the ways in which
migration touches our lives directly through images and stories that
sometimes come back to haunt and perhaps shame us. What we have
explored through the close reading of Jacir’s and Luiselli’s work is the central
role of translation as a key epistemological concept as well as a hermeneutic
and ethical practice in relation to the phenomenon of global migrations
and their cultural representations. As Lawrence Venuti writes, translation
changes everything it touches (Venuti 2013): a translation methodology can
radically change the way we see the world but also ourselves, the way we
hear other people’s stories, and the way we “view, practice, share, and develop
knowledge” (Blumczynski 2016, 30). Indeed, like a vaporetto in Emily Jacir’s
Stazione, translation carries us across, in body and spirit, and creates a space
not only for what Homi Bhabha calls the “tropic movement of cultural
 Translation and Worldly Knowledge 45

translation” (Bhabha 2004, 328), but also for the thought process through
which we, as cultural agents, make sense of what we see. What is occupied by
translation is not really an interstitial space; it is, rather, a semantically and
semiotically overcrowded space where signs and concepts contain multiple
meanings at the same time, as Jacir’s Via Crucis installation powerfully
shows, and enable unique and embodied hermeneutic experiences. This is
perhaps the aspect of the connection between migration and translation
that stands out the most in the works analyzed in this chapter and in this
book—the interwovenness of the physical and intellectual experience that
both translation and migration entail, the concreteness of relocation and
the abstractness of its categories, the theories that explain migration and the
practices through which it takes shape.
46
 2

The Postcolonial Lesson

This word: “shame.” No, I must write it in its original form, not in this
peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus
of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write,
and so forever alter what is written …
Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry “shame” is a wholly
inadequate translation.
—Salman Rushdie, Shame, 1983

2.1 Translation, Migration, and Postcolonial Literature

The previous chapter argued that many of the prevailing perceptions that
inform translation theory and education do not adequately reflect the
complexity involved in material acts of translation and communication and
advocated for the adoption of schemas grounded in the dynamic tension
existing between translation and migration. This chapter follows suit by
building upon those schemas and spelling out how a translational view of
the world also impacts how we look at literature and literature production.
Theorizing translation from within the social, cultural, and political
contingencies of today, in fact, means engaging with plurilingualism as the
face of our global cultural life, a condition that is kept invisible or viewed
as aberrant by the mythic monolingualism of European modernity, which
was both exported and made dominant through colonialism and cultural
imperialism. Viv Edwards and Maria Tymoczko, among others, claim that,
although we are accustomed to imagining monolingualism as the norm, it
might be the case that plurilingualism is more common worldwide (Edwards
2004; Tymockzo 2006): this is almost invariably the case in postcolonial
contexts where translation emerges from within the culture itself as a major
mode of communication and self-expression. As a consequence, postcolonial
literature is the language practice par excellence to emerge out of the nexus
of migration and translation and cannot but be read as a translation affair.
48 The Relocation of Culture

As the epigraph by Salman Rushdie makes explicit, the connection

between migration and translation in postcolonial cultures, as cultures
that were born out of a forced travel-based encounter between peoples and
territories, is foundational and establishes the direct line that connects the
colonial linguistic annihilation of indigenous cultures with the postcolonial
appropriation of European languages that one finds at the core of
postcolonial literature. After all, colonies were meant to be from the start
“translations” of the European “originals” located elsewhere on the map
(Young 2003, 239). Thus, translation was seen as part and parcel of colonial
life and, unsurprisingly, it is also part and parcel of the postcolonial condition
(Bertacco 2014). As the most visible body of literature to have emerged out
of the colonial journey, the postcolonial in fact can be seen as emblematic
of all migrant writing: on the one hand, it highlights the extent to which
it is only the direction that the global journey has taken1 that has changed
from colonial times to nowadays, and what was once called exploration and
colonialism is now called invasion and immigration (Mignolo 2000, 278–9);
on the other, as Rushdie writes in what is his signature translation novel
quoted above, “the immigrants [and] the mohajirs” (Rushdie 1983, 91) are
now in charge of rewriting history from a position of relocation.
Postcolonial literature, thus, occupies a special place in the discussion of
translation and migration that we are articulating in this book. It is defined
not by the nation that contains it—even though it has often been studied as
an extension of the national literature of the colonial “mother country”—
but by the experience of colonization that has marked, at one point or
another, the country’s history. It is also the main corpus of contemporary
literature that must be approached translingually as the linguistic matrix of
these literatures is not containable within the boundaries of former colonial
languages but is inclusive of the indigenous languages, as well as the creole
forms that developed following colonial contact. Hence local vernaculars and
accents characterize these literary texts and present an interesting question
to the reader. The accent in fact marks and, by doing so, alters the standard
(normal/normative) word. Yet the accent also defines the word and the
literary word in particular, because, as Joseph Conrad wrote, “written words
have their accent too” (Conrad 1988, 2). “Who gets to decide,” Conrad asks

1
For lack of a better term, we keep referring to the generic “journey” in this discussion,
even though it implies a horizontal plan of encounter, which is misleading, both when
considering the translation of texts and the translation of cultures. The plans are in fact
asymmetrical in terms of power, prestige, respect, cultural authority, etc. (see on the
topic Mignolo 2000, 278–311).
 The Postcolonial Lesson 49

in the Preface to A Personal Record, “whether an accent is good or bad, right

or wrong?” (Conrad 1988)—the writer, the reader, or the critic? These are
the questions this chapter sets out to answer taking postcolonial literature as
exemplary of migrant writing and proposing translation as the reading lens
for global literary studies. In particular, we have selected to work on a specific
postcolonial context, the Caribbean, renowned for its cultural and linguistic
heterogeneity and to provide “accented readings” of “accented texts” by
Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand.

2.2 The Accent in Postcolonial Writing

Within the anglophone sphere, starting from one of the earliest

postcolonial novels to reach international visibility—Amos Tutuola’s The
Palm-Wine Drinkard, published by Faber and Faber in 1952—we could
compile a very long list of texts that challenge standard English, noticeably
and systematically. In other words, postcolonial writers have explored
the aesthetic possibilities of an accented language. Good examples of
this are Vic Reid’s and Sam Selvon’s early experiments in fiction; Ken
Saro Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English; Kamau Brathwaite’s and
Louise Bennett’s flamboyant innovations in Caribbean poetry; the stories
of “mimic” people told by V. S. Naipaul, or of “translated” people told
by Salman Rushdie; the creoles recorded in Earl Lovelace’s and Velma
Pollard’s works, or sung by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols in
their poems. Through their literary use of language, these writers have
claimed a space for heterogeneity within the global publishing market,
and they have done so by using translation as a mode of artistic creation.
It could indeed be argued that it is the visibility given to accented
writing by postcolonial and minority writers in the past century that has
affected mainstream writing as well so that critics nowadays speak of a
heterolingual canon of contemporary writing that plays with different
languages (Sommer 2004; Ch’ien 2004; Grutman 2006; Lennon 2010;
Walkowitz 2015).
The terms that have been used to talk about accented writing make
abundant use of spatial metaphors: “contact zones” (Pratt 1992), “third
space” (Bhabha 1994, 2004), “translation zones” (Apter 2006), and “trace”
(Spivak 2012). Translation is seen as something that happens somewhere,
in an in-between space, and that has a transformative power. But there is
still a distinction between a monolingual here and a multilingual there, an
insider’s and an outsider’s position, the unmarked us and the global other,
50 The Relocation of Culture

because the vestiges of Eurocentric parameters (spatial, linguistic, ethnic)

still inform the discussion.2 In other words, the replacement of Europe as
the content of what is taught in the emerging global humanities paradigm,
as Starosta perceptively points out, has not dismantled its Eurocentric
form (Starosta 2013, 167) and can still be detected in categories such as the
migrant, the transnational, the global used as “delivery systems” of otherness
(Palumbo-Liu 2012, 21). In fact, while defining the relationship between the
self and the other in spatial and ethnic or linguistic terms, they stabilize the
meaning of the other as intelligible and knowable but imagine the selfsame
to be always stable (Starosta 2013, 164). What we are suggesting in this
book, however, posits translation as a mode of self-expression but also,
and equally importantly, as a model of responsible reading, or, as Lawrence
Venuti writes, “an ethical action […] determined to take responsibility for
bringing a foreign text into a different situation by acknowledging that its
very foreignness demands cultural innovation” (Venuti 2011, 246). In other
words, translation exerts its transformative power by unsettling established
conventions and orthodoxies at both ends of the literary event: it informs the
writing process and it can also inform practices of reading.
Translation organically grows from within postcolonial literatures as a
textual marker that not only highlights the internal tensions within cultures
but shows what it means to write in mother tongues (in the plural), therefore
serving as one of the main aesthetic principles of innovation (Meylaerts and
Serban 2014, 11). Yet this aspect of translation as a principle of aesthetic
renewal is still vastly under-scrutinized in postcolonial literary studies.
Rebecca Walkowitz uses “born translated” for works that “are written as
translation, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which
they have, in fact, been composed” (Walkowitz 2015, 4, emphasis added).
The “text written as a translation” well describes literature that intentionally
explores and plays with “the array of possibilities by juxtaposing or mixing
languages in literature” (Grutman 2006, 19). These are the texts that we
shall call translational. Translation defines their poetics as literary artifacts
and should, therefore, mark the moment of reading as well. This requires a
broadening of the conventional notion of translation, in the sense that the
writer and the translator coincide, but it also enables a practice of reading

2
This amounts to a broad generalization, and there are studies and examples of
translingual texts in European literatures (Dante’s Commedia, Rabelais’s Gargantua and
Pantagruel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, etc.), usually predating the nation-state. However,
the Romantic idea of one language per one culture and people that has informed the
national(istic) view of literature is still visible in the European educational systems. As a
consequence, multilingual, translingual, translational writings have been cast in a fairly
negative light in literary studies (see Meylaerts and Serbian 2014).
 The Postcolonial Lesson 51

that acknowledges the polylingual context out of which these texts emerge
instead of imposing an imagined monolingualism—imagined because it was
never in the colony or postcolony in the first place—and shows the reader as
well as an active translator (Bertacco 2016).
An exemplary lesson in accented reading is offered by Caribbean
literature as the terms and the categories that are crucial to understanding it
come from the traditionally disrespected languages of the region—Creoles—
and the process of their making—creolization. In an ironic and historically
just turning of the tables, a region once deemed the antithesis of civilization
has become one of the most creative laboratories of verbal art, both oral and
written, and this is thanks to its radical creolization of the colonial languages
(Lalla, D’Costa, Pollard 2014, 1). In the following section, we will sketch a
model of literary analysis that, by referring to the operations of translation,
responds to this kind of textual strategies, that is, a literary analysis that
puts at the center of its practice a close attention to the translational poetics
in the texts. We are going to consider three writers belonging to different
generations, coming from three different islands and therefore using their
islands’ Creoles, and who exemplify distinct attitudes toward Creole use in
literary writing. While the selection is necessarily limited, we believe that
it allows for a significant comparative analysis to substantiate the argument
illustrated so far.

2.3 Born Creole: A Caribbean Vocabulary for Reading

The Caribbean region constitutes perhaps the world’s most extensive and
most varied site of creolization as a result of the very different histories of
colonization and enslavement that unfolded on each of the Caribbean islands.
Caribbean creoles3 have developed along different lines, and they stand in
quite different relations to the European languages from which they come.
A useful reminder for anyone interested in the literatures emerging from the
region, as Barbara Lalla matter-of-factly points out, is that “[w]hile Creole
has minority language status in relation to an international language, there
is growing acknowledgment and insistence on the obvious fact that Creole

3
We will hereafter gather the various types of creoles together under the simple rubric
Creole, capitalized, as is commonly done in literary studies and used in the sources that
we cite. We will capitalize Creole when referring to a specific type of creole, therefore
following the typographic convention used with standard languages, and use the term
uncapitalized in all other circumstances.
52 The Relocation of Culture

speakers have majority status within the region” (Lalla 2014b, 104). It comes as
no surprise, then, that Caribbean writers, from Vic Reid to Sam Selvon, from
Kamau Brathwaite to NourbeSe Philip and Velma Pollard, from V. S. Naipaul
to Merle Hodge and Derek Walcott, from Earl Lovelace to Louise Bennett,
from Linton Kwesi Johnson to Dionne Brand, have explored the numerous
possibilities to create a fully Antillean literary language in their works. Such
a language, as Betsy Wing explains in her introduction to Glissant’s Poetics of
Relation, would be “capable of writing the Antilles into history” (Wing 1997,
xi), by escaping the passivity associated with an imposed language of fixed
forms (the colonial language) as well as the folklore traps of representing
Creole merely as dialect, disrespected in intellectual and literary fields, and
therefore repressed as a mode of artistic expression.
In 1976 Édouard Glissant had already expressed his ideas about Creole in
a famous piece entitled “Free and Forced Poetics,” published in the second
issue of Alcheringa, the revolutionary journal of ethnopoetics edited by
Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg in the 1970s. As Glissant explains:

At the beginning was the shout—the beginning is, for us, the time when
Creole was created as a means of communication between the master
and his slaves. It was then that the peculiar syntax of the shout took
hold. To the Antillean the word is first and foremost a sound. Noise is a
speech. Din is a discourse. We must first understand that.
(Glissant 1976, 96)

The question of reading emerges therefore as an important question in such

a linguistic and literary context. How are we to read a shout in a literary
text—as sound or graph? Glissant’s piercing reflection on Creole as sound,
characterized by “the peculiar syntax of the shout,” can be of use when
exploring alternative modes of reading literary texts that flaunt a movement
of words between standard and creolized forms of a European language—
English in the texts under analysis here—because it conveys an understanding
of language itself, in the Caribbean, as Creole. If one adds to this idea the
basic, yet radical, observation that Creole permeates the very act of writing in
the Caribbean even when that writing is not in Creole or not only in Creole,
one has in full view the space of intervention delineated by this chapter.
If the creolization of language and culture is a quintessential feature
of the Caribbean cultural experience, it does not affect—at least not in a
generalized way—how the literature from the region is read. Barbara Lalla,
a scholar who has authored some of the most insightful discussions of
Jamaican literary discourse from a sociolinguistic perspective, refers to this
phenomenon through the concept of gestalt perception, which she defines
 The Postcolonial Lesson 53

in these terms: “It is generally recognized that readers bring to written work
sets of understandings through which (rather than exclusively through the
information of the text itself) a world takes shape in the reader’s mind, a
gestalt” (Lalla 2014a, 60). Lalla posits the gestalt perception of Creole as
“pivotal to the comprehension of much literary discourse in the Caribbean as
Creole discourse” (Lalla 2014a, 61) and this is often missed or glossed over
by non-Creole-speaking readers who only read Creole as a marked choice or
as a dialect and not as literary language. To quote from Lalla once more, “the
persistent assumption that Creole discourse remains inherently oral rather
than literary is simplistic and somewhat paternalistic—a view betraying a
colonial mindset even within academia itself. This is a mindset that so maps
orality into our understanding of Creole as to obscure the extent to which
Creole participates in literary discourse” (Lalla 2014a, 55).
This chapter follows Lalla’s lesson and explores the limitations of the
terminology that literary studies affords readers to describe the use of Creole
in written texts. Given the anglophone context of reference, English literary
studies and stylistics are the fields primarily taken into consideration. The
closest term that we have to describe the use of Creole is dialect, and indeed
dialect has been used in much literary criticism about Caribbean literature.
However, as Kamau Brathwaite argues in his seminal lecture “History of the
Voice,” dialect cannot constitute a viable term in Caribbean literary studies
because of its pejorative overtones:

Dialect is “inferior” English. Dialect is the language when you want to make
fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect. Dialect has a long history
coming from the plantation where people’s dignity was distorted through
their languages and the descriptions that the dialect gave to them. Nation
language, on the other hand, is the submerged area of that dialect that is much
more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It
may be in English, but often it is in an English which is like a howl, or a shout,
or a machine-gun, or the wind, or a wave. It is also like the blues.
(Brathwaite 1993, 266)

Kamau Brathwaite prophetically sets forth nation language as the notion

capable of capturing the spectrum of linguistic expression and meaning
available in the Caribbean region—one that organically shifts from standard
to creole and from oral to written mode. And he acknowledges that, in
the Caribbean, “our novelists have always been conscious of these native
resources, but the critics and academics, as is often the case, lagged far
behind” (Brathwaite 1993, 268). While it is not surprising that, in the late
1970s, Brathwaite could lament a lack of scholarly interest into the ways in
54 The Relocation of Culture

which nation language affects literature, what is striking is that things do

not seem to have changed in a substantial way in the field of anglophone
literary studies in the fifty years elapsed since his lecture. In fact, although
today Creole has become a pervasive feature of written texts, this kind of
cultural and linguistic “overload” (Sommer 2003, 1) is still generally read and
interpreted as a transcription of an oral phenomenon. In literary terms, of
course, this is problematic because it means that Creole is not read for what
it actually signifies in a written text: literature.
The assumed inferiority of dialect to standard language is also problematic
from a postcolonial reading point of view because it colors our reading of the
dialect-speaking characters or of the dialect portions of the text in sociological
terms and hinders a literary reading. As Roberta Cimarosti points out in
her lucid analysis of the postcolonial literary establishment, this critical
stance has all but gone unnoticed and uncriticized by postcolonial writers
themselves (Cimarosti 2014, 60–3). Walcott, for instance, personifies the
patronizing attitude of much postcolonial criticism in the figure of the “critic-
tourist,” the liberal critic who, while warming to “the speech of the ghetto
[…], preaches again, this time with his [sic] criticism, the whole separate-
but-equal argument” (Walcott 1997a, 55). David Dabydeen talks about a
“second epoch of colonization—this time by universal humanoid abstraction
defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are
derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social
neurosis and their value system” (Dabydeen 2011, 45). The problem both
writers address is the lack of a deep engagement with the texts as literature
and, as Cimarosti argues, an inability on the part of the critics “to understand
Caribbean and the literatures in the new Englishes away from the historical
pattern that assigns them the role of victims” (Cimarosti 2014, 61).
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) may seem an unusual choice to talk about
creolization in literature: he considered himself to a large extent a poet of the
written word and very well-read in the traditions that, despite the criticism
he earned for doing so, he claimed as his own, yet—and not surprising for
a writer who began his career in theater—he wrote a good body of verse
in more than one Creole. As problematic an author as Walcott is in the
contemporary literary world,4 he provides a good starting point in a chapter

4
The reference is, of course, to Derek Walcott’s sexual harassment charges during his
years of teaching at Harvard University and Boston University. This chapter looks at the
colossal impact that Derek Walcott’s poetic language has had on Anglophone poetry well
beyond the postcolonial field and the Caribbean region. However, as women academics
teaching in an often misogynistic and sexist institution in the age of the #MeToo
movement, we acknowledge this highly problematic aspect of Walcott’s life.
 The Postcolonial Lesson 55

that focuses only on anglophone Caribbean writing, as his work shows the
use, by an anglophone writer, of a French-based Creole. This provides a
better sense of the gestalt perspective that Lalla mentions as well as of the
highly complex linguistic and cultural makeup of the region. Possession of
Saint Lucia, Walcott’s home island, went back and forth between England and
France more than ten times during the colonial period. The resulting pattern
of language distribution is, therefore, complicated and divided along colonial
language lines: there are areas—mostly rural—that are predominantly
French-Creole speaking, Catholic and black, and areas—mostly urban—that
are Protestant and dominated by English and English-based Creole. Walcott
was raised by an English-speaking Methodist family in Castries, the island’s
capital, but he learned metropolitan French in school. He would have heard
the French-based Creole everywhere while growing up, but there were strong
inhibitions against speaking it. Laurence Breiner explains that “it was the
language associated with the Catholic rural poor, not the class to which his
family belonged” (Breiner 2005, 31).
The poem entitled “Sainte Lucie”—in St. Lucian Creole—was published
in the collection Sea Grapes in 1976 and showcases Walcott’s call to language,
to all the languages he had at his disposal. As we read through the lines,
the operation of translating a place into language—so central to the colonial
experience—unfolds before our eyes:

II
Pomme arac,
otaheite apple,
pomme cythère,
pomme granate,
moubain,
z’anananas
the pineapple’s
Aztec helmet,
pomme,
[…]
Come back to me,
my language.
Come back,
cacao,
grigri,
solitaire
ciseau
the scissor-bird
(Walcott 1986a, 310)
56 The Relocation of Culture

The enchanting tone of these lines, which read like a litany, imparts a seamless
movement from English to French Creole and back, as if each language led,
organically, to the other, the same way as the nouns listed lead—matter-of-
factly—to the flora and the fauna of the island. The invocation to language
in the poem performs, symbolically, a double function: it (re)names the
surrounding nature while shaping a communal tongue. The prayer, as critics
have pointed out, inaugurates for Walcott a new and creative relationship
to Creole. The tongue, however, is double and section III contains—as the
headnote says—a “narrative Creole song heard on the back of an open
truck travelling to Vieuxfort” (314), written entirely in the French Creole of
St. Lucia, while section IV contains its translation into English. In other words,
there are two distinct poems within this text, and each is a slightly different
version of the other. Thematically and structurally, the poem speaks through
translation and its conclusion is a densely interwoven fabric of old and new
stylistic patterns, European languages and Creoles, orality and writing:

generations going
generations gone,
moi c’est gens St. Lucie.
C’est la moi sortie;
is there I born.
(Walcott 1986b, emphasis added)

In Creole poetics, translation and a refusal to translate work hand in hand in

the service of a heightened literary effect. Ciseau is rendered as the scissorbird,
but no translation is given for grigri, solitaire, moi c’est gens St. Lucie. And
this is perhaps the compositional signature of Walcott’s Creole poetics: his
own use of St. Lucian French Creole within an English-based poem in which
the two languages are kept together thanks to a firm rhyming scheme (a, b,
a) that captures the reader’s attention. The first two lines in fact present a
double-rhyme scheme: the word generations is used for the internal rhyme,
while the final rhyme, even though unmarked orthographically, demands
to be read in Creole. The next couplet, in St Lucian Creole, provides the
lyrical nucleus of the stanza: a chiasmus binds together moi and c’est while
gens maintains the internal rhyme with gone of the previous couplet. In the
end, the prosody forces the reader, both Creole- and non-Creole-speaking,
to “read in Creole” in order to make the words going, gone, and born rhyme.
The stanza analyzed above is a linguistic and poetic tour de force by a writer
who was at times abrasive in his critique of what he saw as an indiscriminate
use of Creole in Caribbean literature. In his review of Chamoiseau’s novel
Texaco (written in French Creole), he wrote:
 The Postcolonial Lesson 57

My hatred of the current way of writing down Creole (“orthography”)

is a lost battle, but my rage continues in defeat. Coarsely phonetic, it is
visually crass, its aural range is limited to a concept of peasant or artisan
belligerence that denies its own subtleties of pronunciation, denying its
almost completely French roots.
(Walcott 1997b, 228)

For Walcott the alternative is a truly translational poetics, in which the two
languages are used “side by side, like a facing-text translation” (Cimarosti
2014, 60), as we saw in the poem above. When present, code-meshing and
the blending of Creole and Standard English are subject to the prosodic
needs of the poem. This is perhaps the one feature that traverses Walcott’s
entire poetic production, from the earlier collections to his epic masterpiece
Omeros (1990), notably written in the highly elaborate terza rima:

“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.” (a)

Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking (b)
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news (a)
to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking (b)
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars, (c)
because they could see the axes in our own eyes. (d)
(Omeros, I, i, 3)

Terza rima was created by Dante in the Italian vernacular in the fourteenth
century when Italian was not yet a language as we think of it today. The
interlocking rhyme scheme was meant as a stylistic rendition “of his vision of
an orderly universe replete with underlying patterns created by God” (Beattie
2018, 85). Unsurprisingly, since he considered Dante his model, Walcott uses
the Caribbean vernacular in his own adaptation of the Italian rhyme. As he
explained in a creative writing seminar at the University of Milan in 2001, “If
you set yourself the rules of terza rima, then you are allowed to write about
Paradiso. If you do Paradiso in free verse, it’s not Paradise, because it has no
order. […] There is an idea of order, […] the poem creates its own order”
(Walcott in Loreto 2009, 175).
In Omeros, Walcott expresses his pride in his own poetic art. Achille, one
of the characters, proudly confronts the patronizing attitude of the priest who
wants to correct his language: “[W]hen he smiled at Achille’s canoe, In God
We Troust, / Achille said: ‘Leave it. Is God’ spelling and mine’” (I, I, 8). From an
accented reading point of view, “Is God’ spelling and mine” is not visually crass
or aurally belligerent. Rather, to use the words of Velma Pollard, “Walcott’s use
of Creole […] is selective and quietly forceful” (Pollard 2019, 82).
58 The Relocation of Culture

Thus, we turn now to the work and import of Velma Pollard, another writer
from Walcott’s generation, less internationally known than Walcott, but
who has played an important role in the reevaluation of the folk and Creole
traditions of her native Jamaica. Pollard was born in 1937 in Woodside, a
small rural village in Jamaica; she trained as a teacher and a language educator
in Jamaica and Canada and has contributed much of her own writing and
scholarship to the systematic study and teaching of Jamaican Creole, to the
use of the literary potential of Creole in her own works, as well as to close
readings of other writers’ works in which she focuses on their Creole poetics.
Pollard’s 1989 “Afterword” to her short story collection, Considering Woman I,
became one of the first important statements on literary Creole made by a
Caribbean writer. It was important because it accompanied the literary text
itself and pointed to “the way forward” (Pollard 2012) in terms of how, in
order to read a work of literature, we need to first see the language in which
it is written:

The problem of presenting on the page a language which is without a

tradition of writing, and so one which is not standardised, has existed
ever since West Indians began to try to represent authentic Caribbean
voices. […] And so without any agreement as to how sounds should
be represented, writers have tried to set down something which is
recognisable to people who read English but which reproduces the
sounds of the creole.
(Pollard 2010, 76–7)

An example from this collection of short stories can be of use to capture the
main goal of this chapter: Considering Woman, as the title of the collection,
plays with the two codes used in the text and exploits the “meaning
potential” (D’Costa 2014, 70) that an accented reading offers. As a title,
it strikes the monolingual anglophone reader as unusual: does it mean
“considering women”? Or is the present participle being used as an adjective
for “woman” as a collective noun the same—albeit unmarked—way that it
was common for “man”? A monolingual reading would interpret “woman”
as the object in the phrase so the title would read “a collection of stories
considering/about woman.” On the other hand, however, a Jamaican Creole
reading would recognize “considering” as an adjective of “woman” and
“woman” as the subject of the phrase, changing remarkably the meaning
of the title to “a collection of stories about woman as a thinking person”
(Pollard 2014, 94).
In many of her works Velma Pollard retells stories from her island,
complicating or questioning their meanings and, as Daryl Cumber-Dance
 The Postcolonial Lesson 59

points out, “resemanticizing” them (Cumber-Dance 2008, 10). Beyond

the thematic aspect, however, the folk tradition seems to be entrenched in
her work stylistically as well. The short story, the novella, the poem are the
prevalent genres in Pollard’s creative output: they are all brief compositions
and share a terseness of form, which, in turn, is reflected in the writer’s
measured use of language. A good example from Pollard’s oeuvre is Karl,
a novelette published in 1992 that won the Casa de las Americas Prize
(1992) for fiction written in English or an anglophone Creole—one of Latin
America’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. Set between Jamaica
and Canada in the mid-1960s, the novelette tells the story of Karl, a brilliant
child who grows up in a small village called Hopeville and lives through
Jamaica’s transition from colony to postcolony, trying to come to terms with
the oppositional value systems implicit in the political change. Karl is raised
and doted upon by his mother, “Auntie,” who sacrifices herself for the sake
of his education and future success in life, a success that Karl achieves at the
price of his own psychological and emotional well-being.
Karl opens with a brief creation tale about the black man, which provides
the refrain—almost a story within the story—as well as the framework of
interpretation for the book:

Im is a self-made man
Im mek imself
Das why im no mek good
(Masters, who will define what “good” is?)
(Karl 26)

In biblical terms, if compared to divine creation, human self-creation can

only be imperfect, of course. However, the word “Masters” possibly invokes
the context of the plantation with its disparaging view of the black subject.
Seemingly uncomplicated and rendered in a terse and highly readable style,
Karl offers an engrossing reading experience, interrupted by a few portions
in Creole that arrest the reading and call for a rereading. For the non-Creole
reader, in fact, the presence of Creole leaves a gap in one’s comprehension of the
text. The gap can be filled and the deviation from the Standard English of the
rest of the story can be rendered significant only if the reader perceives some
deeper connection, which compensates for the linguistic oddity. Therefore, by
paying attention to the Creole sections in the text, non-Creole-speaking readers
also gain a much deeper appreciation of the craftiness of Karl as a literary text.
Creole is used in three main ways in Karl: as in the quotation above, it
provides an explicit link with Jamaican folk stories and proverbs and their
formulaic genre; it is used in the service of characterization and therefore
60 The Relocation of Culture

particularly visible in dialogue (which is the most common literary use of

Creole), but it is also used, on rare but meaningful occasions, as the language
of narration. Karl’s loving, hard-working, and dedicated mother, Auntie, is
an important character in the book and is always presented speaking Creole:
“‘Mek dih bwoy take dih Entrance, Teecha,’ Auntie had said, with not the
vaguest idea how she would put the school fees together if I ever did pass that
Entrance” (Karl 30). Auntie’s imperative to the teacher is a gem for literary
analysis. What sounds like, and in fact is, an authoritarian order captures
the pride, the love and the emotional decision Auntie is making about Karl’s
future. The use of Creole here is not only relevant but useful to Auntie’s
characterization; it is foregrounded for rhetorical emphasis and memorability,
as often occurs in oral genres, as it provides the emotional accent of the
sentence and impresses in the reader’s memory Auntie’s strength as well as
her clarity of vision. Unlike Karl, who shifts in-between different linguistic,
cultural, and social orders, Auntie is firmly rooted to the ground and, as the
text shows through its style, Auntie and Karl speak different languages.
The tension in the life of the protagonist between his comfortable life
in rural Hopeville and the promise of success and advancement offered by
education is expressed by the frequent code-switching between Standard
Jamaican English (SJE) and Jamaican Creole (JC) in the novelette:

Ras I with his multicoloured tam and pointed beard was a prophet:
“You gwaine to Babylon school, man!”
“Noh seh mi neva warn you.”
“Mmmhmmmmm.”
“Oh Babyloooooooooon, why dost thou despoil my children? Their
feet shall seek no more the temples of the wicked … Soon! Soooon!
Isaiah Chapter … ”
I never stopped or listened to get the exact reference the fast-fast-
walking brother moving with his stick would quote as he measured
his steps up Vineyard Road.
(Karl 33–4)

The pace of the narrative is often quickened through fast shifts between
many registers and codes. In this case, a biblical reference follows the Rasta
prophet’s warning, in a different religious register, to the young boy. But
because Karl, as the subtitle reads, is A Monologue in the Mind of a Man, it
is written in the first-person singular so the narrator using Jamaican Creole
overlaps with the writer using Jamaican Standard English. A good example of
this is the phrase “people like her not on his conscience” from the quotation
below, which indicates Karl’s awareness of the inner stratification of Jamaican
 The Postcolonial Lesson 61

society. This type of code ambiguity occurs rarely in this novelette and rarely
in Pollard’s oeuvre as a whole. When it happens, it signals the few moments
of wholeness of the protagonist, the moments, that is, in which he speaks as
a whole person and in his own voice, albeit a voice that, while not double, is
mixed:

Auntie never heard Ras I, for he was a city chap, Warieka Hills Rasta,
and never came to Hopeville. Technically, people like her not on his
conscience. But even if she had heard, she wouldn’t have listened. For
she and I and Teacher Brown had already harkened to the long-haired
maiden of all our water gullies singing in her high-pitched voice:

Ef you cyan cook Daddy white rice

You cyan go a Daddy yard.
Ef you cyan wash Daddy white shirt
You cyan go a daddy yard …

If you can’t read Daddy book you can’t buy Daddy house.
(Karl 34, emphasis added)

Indeed, the inevitable and difficult confrontation with “Daddy book,” in the
quotation above, captures well the metaliterary framework within which
all the writers who make a creative, aesthetically as well as ideologically,
intentional use of Creole considered in this chapter are operating. An intense
linguistic and literary reflection in fact constitutes a central theme in two
poetry collections by the third and final author presented in this chapter:
Dionne Brand. Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad, in 1953, Brand moved
to Canada in 1970, where she has lived ever since. Her search for a poetic
language to claim as her own is often seen as her response to her experience as
an immigrant, as her way to face the challenge of finding a literary genealogy
in which to bear witness to her life and to her West Indian roots. Since 1997,
when she received the Governor General’s Award for poetry (Canada’s
most prestigious literary prize) for Land to Light On, Brand has been fully
acknowledged as a key member of Canada’s literary scene alongside authors
such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Michael Ondaatje. At the same
time, however, her work has been studied as belonging to a transnational
Caribbean literary tradition.5
5
See Maria Casas’s Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing, 123–9; Edward J.
Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies, 266–70; Rinaldo
Walcott, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada, 73–88.
62 The Relocation of Culture

No Language Is Neutral, published in 1990, is the first poetic text in which

Brand moves back and forth between Standard English and Trinidadian
English Creole. The book’s title is taken from a line from Derek Walcott6
to which Brand responds: “No language is neutral seared in the spine’s
unravelling. / Here is history too” (No Language, 34). The self is reconstructing
her genealogy and going back to her personal memories. Liney is the poet’s
grandmother, the woman who stays when her own mother leaves. But as
an adult poet, Brand realizes she does not know anything about Liney as a
woman, the kind of things she liked or disliked, the dreams she had, the men
she loved. So she tries to find out from her uncle Ben who says, “[S]he was
a sugar cake, sweet sweet/sweet. Yuh muma! that girl was a sugar cake!” (No
Language, 24). This is the story the poetic persona is both distancing herself
from as a writer but also bearing witness to in this book of poetry about
women who are unknown to their own children:

When Liney reach here is up to the time I hear about.

Why I always have to go back to that old woman who
wasn’t even from here but from another barracoon, I
never understand but deeply as if is something that
have no end. Even she daughter didn’t know but only
leave me she life like a brown stone to see.
(No Language, 24)

The stanza above is an example of Creole used as unmarked code, not for the
purpose of characterization, as it was in the quotation from the uncle, but as
poetic language. The poet is musing upon the mystery that Liney’s life is to
her, as it probably was to her mother as well, and on the unexplainable need
that she feels to go back to her and to the island, with no end. The syntax
shifts seamlessly between Standard English and Trinidadian English Creole
(TEC henceforth) without marking the Creole portions or leaving the non-
Creole-speaking reader out. Yet the poetic climax of the last line, with the
image of the poet’s mother leaving the island but also becoming, like Liney, “a
brown stone to see,” is achieved by the increased use of TEC in the last three
lines of the stanza.
To date, Brand has not written entire poems in Creole. However, she has
used Creole as a distinctive stylistic choice in No Language Is Neutral and in
the following work Land to Light On (1997) to mark, both emotionally and
lyrically, very intense moments in the texts. In Land to Light On, for instance,

6
The book’s title is taken from a line from Derek Walcott’s poem “LII I heard them
marching the leaf-wet roads of my head,” Midsummer, in Collected Poems 1948–1984, 506.
No language is neutral;/ the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral/where some
took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,/ helped widen its shadow.
 The Postcolonial Lesson 63

Brand often blends Trinidadian English Creole and Standard English in what
Ashcroft calls “syntactic fusion” (Ashcroft 2009) or code ambiguity, and the
result is particularly poignant, as in the stanza below:

I lift my head in the cold and I get confuse.

It quiet here when is night, and is only me
and the quiet. I try to say a word but it fall. […]
… I did not
know which way to turn except to try again, to find
some word that could be heard by the something
waiting. My mouth could not find a language.
I find myself instead, useless as that. I sorry.
I stop by the mailbox and I give up.
(Land to Light On, 5, emphasis added)

Since the Creole past tense and the non-Creole English present tense have
the same structure (e.g., no dental suffix in “lift,” “confuse,” “try,” “stop”;
unmarked tense in “get,” “find,” “give” due to the highly analytical nature
of creole languages),7 the consciousness of the speaking voice in this stanza
shifts between the narrator in the past tense, and the actor in the present
tense. But it also shifts between a literary, relatively assured persona—the one
who is writing—and a Creole-speaking and “sorry” persona—the one who is
written about. Read with this in mind, the line “My mouth could not find a
language” makes intensely palpable the gulf between the poet and the world
around her, a world in which Creole cannot serve her as a language. Yet if
Creole is not a respected language in her new country, it is not only respected
but essential in the poem itself where Brand explores ways of writing that
look and sound standard and creole at the same time.
In conclusion, the examples offered above showcase different approaches
to Creole writing as translational. While Pollard in the late 1980s and early
1990s is “showing” Creole in her stories by putting it in the mouth of her
characters and capturing the dynamism of the Creole continuum on the
page, she nevertheless does not associate her authorial voice with it. In
contrast, Brand, in the mid-1990s, exploits the points of coincidence between

7
Some of the terminology commonly used in creole linguistics (zero copula, non-marking
of past tense of third-person singular, etc.) to describe creoles has been criticized as
Eurocentric as it bases the description of creoles on the structure of European languages
and therefore identifies areas of lack. More recent approaches have instead emphasized
the highly analytical nature of creoles. See Laura Ekberg, Heterolingualims and Cultural
Integrity in Finnish Translations of Anglophone Caribbean Novels. PhD diss., University
of Turku, 30–1.
64 The Relocation of Culture

standard and creole and elevates creole as a language of poetry. As a linguist,

Pollard seems very interested in the viability of a Caribbean grapholect: in
her literary works, she balances accuracy and accessibility in order to write
for a wide—Caribbean as well as international—audience. Brand’s use of
Creole is instead cagey and incorporates a metalinguistic reflection on
Creole, which, in Pollard’s case, is present but, with very few exceptions, is
not fully incorporated into the text itself. As for Walcott, in his search for the
perfect clarity of expression, his poetry says it all: “Like Philoctete’s wound,
this language carries its cure” (Omeros, LXIV, ii, 323).

2.4 Accented Reading

In her article on translation and the global humanities, Anita Starosta reminds
us that “there is no such thing as an utterance without an accent” (Starosta
2013, 179). This insight has provided the starting point of the reading model
proposed in this chapter. In Starosta’s articulation, accented criticism presents
two interrelated aspects worth mentioning: the fact that the foreign does not
come from another place or culture but is already here, and that the foreign
is also in the voice of our own criticism and theory (Starosta 2013, 167). In
other words, if we want to prevent “global” as a category from becoming the
umpteenth descriptor of otherness, we need to rethink the premises through
which we look at literature as a primarily linguistic act. Translation, we have
argued, is the premise that can allow a decolonial—and accented—reading
practice by making the reader enter the translative exchange as a translator—
the “reader-as-translator” or “RAT,” in Spivak’s incisive acronym (Spivak
2000, 384).
“Translation is the most intimate act of reading,” Spivak famously writes
in her essay “Translation as Culture” (Spivak 2012, 255) in which she reflects
on her life-long engagement with the practice of translation: from her early
translation of Derrida’s De la Grammatologie from French into English to her
later translations of Mahasweta Devi’s works from Bengali—Spivak’s mother
tongue—into English. But the opposite is also true, as Spivak acknowledges
when she refers to “sympathetic reading as translation” (Spivak 2000, 384).
In this chapter, we have argued that accented reading is an important act
of translation: the reader/translator bears the responsibility to access “the
protocols of a text” (Spivak 2012, 271) in order to understand it deeply and
sympathetically but also to show competence as a “postcolonial reader.”
Since in this book we are dealing with accents, the most obvious example we
considered was the category of dialect used to read what some postcolonial
 The Postcolonial Lesson 65

writers are doing with language interference and translational textualities but
in effect blocking a true engagement with the original and innovative ways in
which the translational text functions.
Thus, accented reading can be broadly described as reading through
translation, a reading practice that sees the accent in writing as a plus and,
through the lens of translation, chooses to discuss it critically. The question
for the reader, then, is how to make sense of these textual strategies without
resorting to the literary categories mentioned earlier that keep postcolonial
literatures in an enclave separated from literature tout court. Too often, in
fact, the postcolonial literary text is read and raided anthropologically as an
“unmediated text” (Huggan 2001, 39) and used as a substitute for historical
or political analyses of national cultures, therefore bracketing any aesthetic
value the text may possess. Is it because, as Fredric Jameson boldly wrote
in 1986, the “third-world novel will not offer us the satisfactions of Proust
or Joyce”? (Jameson 1986, 65). This is a broad and complex question and it
could lead us astray in our discussion of accented reading. However, it does
illuminate the issue of the contingency of literary value, which is taken for
granted in Jameson’s case and points to the issue of the legibility—rather than
intelligibility—of the postcolonial literary text, which needs to be considered.
In fact, in order to name—in Gerard Genette’s terms—the figures of a text,
the reader has to be able to see them in the first place (Bertacco 2009, 324–9).
Granted, culturally distant texts do pose a challenge to some of their readers,
but no more than texts from a different epoch. Derek Attridge has written
eloquently on the topic (Attridge 2004, 50–3). In his view, acknowledging
the cultural distance is part of our response to these texts, but it is not what
makes them literary. When we read famous works from the past, like Dante’s
Commedia or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we generally rely on the work of scholars
(our professors, the introductory notes, or study guides) who help us glean
the work’s originality against its context. But we still respond to the Commedia
or Hamlet in personal terms: they either speak to us of new possibilities of
meaning, or feeling, or they don’t. In the same way, while sociohistorical and
linguistic knowledge is not indispensable for our response to the postcolonial
literary text, it objectively helps us understand the text and its originality
better, or more in depth, the same way that Cliff Notes help contemporary
students read Hamlet better, or in ways that might not have occurred to them
on their own. In other words, postcolonial literature simultaneously offers
and elicits a distinctive reading experience, a postcolonial reading experience,
in which the translative aspect of the reading process is foregrounded.
We opened this chapter calling for new shared vocabularies for reading
today’s literary works. Our final claim is that the Caribbean has provided
postcolonial and literary studies with one such vocabulary. Brathwaite’s nation
66 The Relocation of Culture

language, Glissant’s poetics of relation, the theory of the “Creole continuum”

developed by the linguists Bickerton and DeCamp and popularized—in the
field of postcolonial studies—by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin in The Empire
Writes Back (1989, 2005) have altered, each in its own way, once and for all
how we understand the intricate connection between language and culture
in postcolonial contexts. We have offered translation as a viable approach to
describe the distance traversed by meaning between the event of writing and
the event of reading the postcolonial literary text. Postcolonial literatures, and
Caribbean literatures in particular, are perfect examples of the “heterolingual
address” of translation:8 the postcolonial writer in English often writes as
a foreigner to a world readership of foreigners through a heteroglossic, or
translational, text, a text that speaks its own difference. Creoles remind us
that a language is a human behavior and consists of what people do with
it. One lesson that postcolonial writing, when read through a translational
lens, teaches us is that the notion that our cultural identity is hardwired
into our language does not hold; if this were true, the very existence of
postcolonial literatures, that is, literatures written mostly—not exclusively—
in former colonial languages, would be threatened. By extension, the
newness introduced by postcolonial writing profoundly reconstitutes what
is labeled and considered “Literature.” As Ashcroft perceptively points out,
“post-colonial writing necessarily produces a different reader—a translated
reader, just as it produced a translated/translating writer” (Ashcroft 2009,
159). Together, translation and creolization provide more than just an
explanation of how Caribbean literatures work: they demand that we set
aside preconceived notions of language that are inapplicable to many literary
contexts—not just postcolonial ones—and that we learn, from the texts,
how to read.

8
We find Naoki Sakai’s concept of heterolingual address conducive to a literary criticism
sensitive to the different positionalities of address in the translingual literary text: “In
the case of translation, however, an ambiguity in the translator’s positionality makes
the instability of the we as subject rather than of the I, since the translator cannot be a
unified and coherent personality in translation. This suggests the possibility of a different
attitude of address, namely, the ‘heterolingual address’ […], a situation in which one
addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner” (Sakai 2009, 176).
 Part Two

Migration as Translation
68
 3

Navigating the Mediterranean Sea

I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom I
remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am.
—Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, 1909

3.1 Mediterranean Blood Ties

As anticipated by Bertacco, the approach proposed in this second part of the

volume is deeply related to the notion of “born translated” introduced by
Rebecca Walkowitz and applied to the debate on literary translation today.
Believing that this notion may be exploited as a picklock to enter the house of
current critical discussions about migration and hybridity and can equip the
researcher with theoretical tools that may be more suitable than the traditional
ones, we will try to show how different Western artists have suggested diverse
ways to make sense of a totally new condition: mass migration in the specific
context of the Mediterranean Sea. Within this geographical frame, for
reasons explained below, the issues of uncertain belonging, national identity,
and motherland tend to acquire a specific flavor that descends from the
peculiar nature of the area surrounding this closed basin. In other words,
we are persuaded that the forced “translation” of human beings from the
northern coasts of Africa to the southern coasts of Europe must take into
account the complex quality of this geographical environment, a quality that
has developed through time and that has produced a multilayered reservoir
of representations that have grown into a vital part of Mediterranean cultures,
thus becoming the most obvious epistemological tool for dealing with what
is currently defined the “terror of invasion.”
Simplifying a little, it may be said that the Mediterranean cultures reveal
two mutually related aspects. On the one hand, the sense of commonality that
has been developing since ancient times among the civilizations flourishing
70 The Relocation of Culture

around (and mostly because of) the sea has gradually shaped the feeling that
we do belong to the same race (“stessa faccia stessa razza” [same face, same
race], as the saying goes).1 On the other, among postcolonial countries, the
colonial legacy in Africa has produced a “born-translated” attitude supporting
the traditional European tendency to represent the other according to a set
of predigested and culturally authorized stereotypes that the migrants have
endorsed over time. The notion of “being written as translation” (Walkowitz
2015, 4) has been deeply absorbed, in a way well exemplified, for example,
by the protagonist of Chris Abani’s Graceland (2005) who performs as Elvis
Presley in the streets of Lagos while hoping to migrate to the United States.
In his seminal study on Mediterranean cultures, Fernand Braudel
reconstructs the long history of this closed basin. He clearly states that even
a generic look at the many civilizations flourishing in the area confirms
the now widespread opinion that the Mediterranean is “not even a single
sea,” but a “multifarious collection of indented, sandy and rocky coastlines,
gulfs, peninsulas, islands, hosting endlessly moving populations that have
been meeting, melting and hybridizing since the origins of civilizations”
(Braudel 1995, Vol. I, 16–18). In their The Corrupting Sea. A Study of
Mediterranean History, Horden and Purcell update this position, showing
how the Mediterranean Sea has always been—and has been narrated as—a
place of migration crossed and recrossed by several stories that interlaced in
the same way as the populations living on the coasts intermingled (Horden
and Purcell 2000, 342–400). This very nature raises issues related to diversity
and coexistence and triggers the need to represent a constantly changing,
multifarious, and unstable reality to make sense of them (Hall, Evans and
Nixon 1997, 1–5).
Therefore, any analysis of the current narratives of migration in this area
must obviously relate to the tradition that has contributed to revising the
imagery of the journey of migration by sea in this context, though in full
awareness that things have changed dramatically over time. Consequently,
the idea of migration as a kind of translation is truly ancient, maybe more
ancient in Europe than in the United States, and it has already produced a
number of “representations,” all of which are oriented toward a successful or
effective “translation” of the migrant as an exile. The shadow of Odysseus and
of his literary offspring—readily evoked in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (2015) as
well as in Vanessa Redgrave’s Sea Sorrow (2016)—is still the dominant trope,
that of the nomadic traveler unable to reach a safe haven, and his ship is still
very much a prototype (Malkin 1998). And Antigone helps Ubah Cristina

1
All translations from Italian are ours unless otherwise indicated.
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 71

Ali Farah make sense of the condition of true-to-life migrants selected to

perform her Antigone Power.2 Through these cultural tools, sedimented in
time and tested and reshaped in different narratives, some contemporary
artists have been trying to articulate a new code and translate the experience
of exile into literary storytelling.
In this sense, the “European approach” to the issue of translation as the
process of moving through languages, cultures, experiences, religions, arts,
and sciences is necessarily “accented.” It stands out against a highly specific
cultural backdrop and, to a certain extent, it draws its tools and motivations
from a definite diachronic development. Precisely for these reasons, we
share Starosta’s position on globalization and more specifically her statement
that the “form” of Eurocentrism—including the recurring pattern of its
recognition as a paradigm—is still very much present even now that we
have gone “global.” Thus, the other, though rationally recognized within the
new frame of a globalized Europe, still obtains visibility if and when he/she
adapts to a recognition paradigm—a pharmakon—that is at the same time an
obstacle and the only means to obtain full visibility within the existing object
system (Starosta 2013, 169). We would also take a step forward and add that
Europe is very far from being a single “country” (Balibar 2004, 5–7). The new
permeability of borders between one nation and the other has not erased the
preexisting symbolic, linguistic, cultural, and urban boundaries (Mezzadra
and Neilson 2013, vii). Hence the much-promoted positive feelings about
removing borders and suddenly becoming citizens of the same “nation”
merely respond to a top-down process that is by no means collectively agreed
upon and that is matched by a strongly localized insistence on the specific
characteristics of each single area in the European patchwork.
Implicitly, what makes the whole process more complex is the fact that it
has two levels. The first is synchronic and concerns the relationship connecting
different, though similar, populations bordering the Mediterranean Sea; the
second is diachronic and regards the impact of a long-established tradition
of migration in the same area and one that has already produced a number of
representations and attempts at translating the other into manageable terms.
In short, the diachronic process leading to the constitution of nation-states,
ideally endowed with specific “unique” features, has gradually eroded this

2
The project, started in 2018 and supported by the municipality of Palermo together
with several cultural associations working with migrants, consisted in the adaptation
of Sophocles’s tragedy by the artist and performer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. The final
performance involved the participants in a theatrical workshop—both professionals
and immigrants—who were gradually led to connect the classical play with the actual
experience of being an asylum seeker in Italy.
72 The Relocation of Culture

commonality, and the current emergency of mass migration has shown that
this shared legacy is not so widely shared and that the cultural and political
differences are quite clear and separate one nation from the other.
What we want to do in this chapter is examine the way in which some
European artists are trying to represent the journey of migration—a journey
they have never experienced personally—by interlacing different influences
and by combining the synchronic ability to gather documents, information,
details, testimonies on the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea today, and the
diachronic awareness of far more ancient tales of migration, taking place
in the same area but belonging to very different times. Their process of
encoding these complex experiences is rooted in their culture of belonging
and results in a text that is then to be decoded by the audience—in their turn
necessarily influenced by the culture(s) they were born into and/or live in.
In short, people translated from one country to another in the process of
migration mobilize a new concept of translation, in which migrants are, as
Polezzi suggests, active agents (Polezzi 2012, 353).

3.2 Making Sense of the Unknown

“Re-voicing a refugee or asylum seeker’s motivation to flee famine, war or

persecution, for example,” writes Moira Inghilleri, “often requires more than
linguistic and cultural skills, as deliberation regarding whether universal
hospitality should be denied or granted are habitually fused with social,
political and discursive instruments of power” (Inghilleri 2017, 31).3 This also
calls into play the collectively constructed consciousness of the foreigner as a
disturbing factor in a previously balanced community. The shared drive toward
normalization—a drive that is human, necessary, and fully understandable
in all respects—takes different shapes, all congruent with the need to make
sense of the unknown through the known. We devise a code that can allow
us to approach what would otherwise be too “far away” and too “different”
to be manageable. Translation works here as a method of social and cultural
composition and it functions on several levels (not only linguistic).
In her booklet published by Gallimard, A ce stade de la nuit (2014),
Maylis de Kerangal comments on the tragic shipwreck that took place in

3
Here, Inghilleri is developing an assumption introduced in her Interpreting Justice, and
precisely in the chapter entitled “Interpreting the Asylum Applicants” (2012, 72–98), but
now she expands her reflection, going beyond the mostly technical approach that was
outlined there.
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 73

the Mediterranean Sea on October 3, 2013, only a few miles off the coast
of Lampedusa. In a frantic attempt at making sense of the event, she goes
back to the description of the Mediterranean island provided by Tomasi di
Lampedusa in Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), which was later adapted
for the cinema by Luchino Visconti (1963).4 At a loss when trying to cope
with a tragedy she cannot understand, de Kerangal resorts to literature and
art as to make more familiar an experience that is totally alien to her. She
moves sidelong and frames her comments on the tragedy within a context
that she feels more congruent with her experience as a Westerner and as an
intellectual, thus reducing the impact of an event that would, otherwise, be
highly disruptive. The “code” she composes in order to get nearer to the core
meaning of the tragedy occurring in the Mediterranean Sea is at the same time
perfectly efficient (because it provides an apparent tool for understanding)
and totally misleading (because it adapts a real-life, massive, humanitarian
emergency to the literary representation of the island that is going to bear
the weight of it). In the same way, in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen
(2015), Richard, the old retired professor, who makes intermittent attempts
to help the migrants in a refugee center in Berlin, finds out that he can exploit
his classical education to enter the world of people from Ghana, Chad,
Nigeria, and other parts of Africa, which were, shamefully, unfamiliar to him
before. He takes notes on their religions, cultures, ways of life, drawing closer
to their world. Later on, he goes back to the myth of the Gorgon, revising it
in the light of Berber mythology (Erpenbeck 2015, 180), and articulates the
meanings of slavery and hospitality by making references to Seneca, Plato,
Ovid, Empedocles (Erpenbeck 2015, 299). Practically, that same classical
culture he used to teach when working as a professor becomes the “language”
that allows him to build a bridge with the foreigner. It may be said, in fact,
that Richard is translating the experience of the past into the horizon of
the present, transforming it into a code, in the same way that de Kerangal
seems to vaguely grasp the enormous weight of the tragedy occurring in the
Mediterranean Sea through the literary representations of the place provided
by di Lampedusa.
Yet one must also be aware of what gets lost in this process of cultural
translation. Even referring to this operation in the broad sense given to
the term by Sakai and Solomon when they show how universalism and
particularity interact in the recurring tendency to reduce otherness to the

4
For marketing reasons, perhaps, de Kerangal’s booklet was re-titled Lampedusa (2016),
emphasizing the reference to the island and removing (at least from the title) the point of
view of the author who is fully immersed into another time and another space.
74 The Relocation of Culture

identification of the other as a stereotype (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 150–60),

the passing from one code to another, the attempt at “transporting” the other
into our world, is fatally incomplete and only partly possible. The core of
otherness still remains, and it may be ethically right to respect its resilience:
when trying to tell a story they have not experienced, Westerners should be
aware—and respectful—of this resilience and that their point of view is (and
must be) different (Vallorani 2017, 43–59). Here, again, Apter’s work on the
twin notions of translatability and untranslatability comes into play. In her
words:

Untranslatability is not unlike Walter Benjamin’s notion of translatability;

qualified as something that cannot be communicated in language, a
kernel of “the foreign” that remains, an ineffable textual essence only
realizable in the translational afterlife, or a sacred literalness of the
revelatory word that great literary works strive for but rarely ever achieve.
(Apter 2008, 584)

Consequently, any conversion of a text into another language results in

the unavoidable discarding of some details, some taste of the atmosphere,
some cultural references that will not be transposed (Apter 2008, 582–5).
This is what Apter has called “ineffable textual essence” (Apter 2008, 583):
the foreign flavor always marking a translated text and fatally impairing the
total understanding of the original source or model. The same point may
be applied to the act of trying to represent, artistically, the experience of
forced migration through Western eyes. As a Westerner, living in reasonably
comfortable conditions and with no experience whatsoever of stumbling
through the desert, being imprisoned in a detention camp, or crossing
the Mediterranean Sea on an overcrowded raft, we should respect what is
the cultural/semantic equivalent of Apter’s “ineffable textual essence” and
keep in mind that our Eurocentric cultures go on being solidly there even
when their specific contents have been removed (or presumably so) by
globalization (Starosta 2013, 164). As Bhabha, quoting Benjamin, reminds
us, when crossing borders, the migrant gains practice in a performance
grounded in pre-given ethnic or cultural traits, reshaped by the need to adapt
to new circumstances. There is always an “element of resistance in the process
of transformation, ‘that element of translation which does not lend itself to
translation’” (Bhabha 2004, 321).
Thus, we go back to the persistence of borders. As in translating a foreign
language, when representing the other through the tools of our cultures, we bring
them as human beings into a signifying code unknown to them but familiar to
us. This process does not remove the otherness but adapts it: the boundaries
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 75

are not canceled but become crossable. The process of “relocation” as a way
of drawing new borders is a nodal point. Quite obviously, the geographical
removal of national limina does not imply a symbolic act of forgetting. From a
general perspective, the increasing securitization and militarization of borders
is a way of reacting to the European (maybe Western) fear of being unable to
understand (and to label and therefore control) an identity (here given in the
singular but in fact plural) of the other that has ancient roots. Therefore, what
we do is stabilize a fluid identity-in-progress, translating it into a stereotype of
evil and/or feebleness that we are able to understand.
As Mezzadra and Neilson state, “Our interest in changing borders and
migration regimes in a world in which national borders are no longer the
only or necessarily the most relevant ones for dividing and restricting labor
mobilities” clashes with the fact that the fading of national (European)
borders has not produced the removal of borders but the increasing relevance
of other, much more dangerous, and persistent, kinds of borders (Mezzadra
and Neilson 2013, 2). Typically, the constantly redrawn frontiers in southern
Europe continue to be the loci of translation. “Refugees,” “migrants,” “asylum
seekers,” “unaccompanied minors” are to be understood as what they are in
practice: filtering words that are filtering human beings. What emerges in
language is, once again, a symptom of disturbance that happens to echo a
diseased human condition. As Apter explains:

A subset of politics at large, with particular agendas and strategic

interests, language politics defines its theater of war in the space
where a military zone may be superimposed on a linguistic hot spot or
“translation zone”. The expression “translation zone” could well refer
to the demarcation of a community of speakers who achieve an ideal
threshold of communication (the utopia of Leibnitz, von Humboldt, and
Habermas). But when war is at issue, it makes more sense to define it
as a translation no-fly zone, an area of border trouble where the lines
dividing discrete languages are muddy and disputatious, where linguistic
separatism is enforced in high-surveillance missions or, where misfired,
off-kilter semantic missiles are beached or disabled.
(Apter 2006, 129)

Now the question is: what is translated, in the real world, when a person
crosses a border? The body emphatically becomes a sign: it communicates.
Little Bee, in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, reflects on her condition in
the detention center on the outskirts of London, and she imagines that her
body might be made into a British pound, which can easily cross borders
without suffering (Cleave 2009, 1–3). She hides the fact that she is a girl to
76 The Relocation of Culture

protect herself from the possibility of being “understood” as a female and

therefore violated (Cleave 2009, 7–11). She re-signifies her belonging so as to
be more easily accepted. And in so doing, she recapitulates the experience of
exile, which may be universally perceived as “a discontinuous state of being”
ultimately producing “a condition of terminal loss,” as Said suggests (Said
1984, 137–49), though it also implies an intense specificity, cultural and
personal, that is slippery and ambiguous, “foreign” and untranslatable. The
universal aspect of exile was well explained by Said—an exile himself—in 1984
and undoubtedly referring to conditions that are not the ones experienced by
current migrants. He specifies, “The achievements of exile are permanently
undermined by the loss of something left behind forever” (Said 1984, 137).
This “something” takes highly diversified shapes that cannot be translated
into a single narration but must go through multiple rites of passage taking
place at equally varied intersections. Even so, the “kernel of the ‘foreign’ that
remains,” and that Apter mentions (Apter 2008, 584), still persists, though
often enveloped in a cultural halo that represents the core of the (Western)
tradition and its only way of coping.
In this impossibility of understanding, the “locatedness” of discourse—
namely, the inextricable connections between any representation and the
context from which it springs—plays a primary role: some places are more
prone than others to being perceived as intersections, and this makes them,
at the same time, riskier and more interesting. It imposes the obligation
to give up the certainty of knowing what is foreign and where it might be
found (Starosta 2013, 164). We need to cultivate doubt. The recognition
paradigm outlined by Starosta needs to be overcome: it is true that it may be
a pharmakon, but it proves to be an obstacle in the Mediterranean Sea.

3.3 The “Project of Unforgetting”

“Literature in dominant languages,” writes Walkowitz, “tends to ‘forget’

that it has benefitted from literary works in other languages” (Walkowitz
2015, 23). In a way, this applies not only to “born-translated fiction” as a
tool for triggering the process of unforgetting, but it can help to explain the
relationship between ex-colonized people and the ex-colonizers once the
decolonizing process is fairly advanced. Migrants from Africa, maybe more
than others, bring with them a double cultural burden. They are the children
of a European colonization that superimposed a foreign culture onto their
own—and therefore, in most cases, they may be defined as born-translated—
but they are also engaged in the process of safeguarding the memory of their
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 77

culture of origin. Sometimes, they are even supported by Western artists,

who seem to engage willingly in the process of unforgetting that is described
by Walkowitz.
Sea Sorrow (2016), directed by the artist and activist Vanessa Redgrave,
seems to raise precisely this issue, documenting the actress’s journey through
several refugee camps in Italy, France, and Lebanon. Significantly, the film’s
editing creates a specific “language,” choosing to space out the sequences
shot in the camps—properly belonging to the genre of documentary film
reporting—with acted out passages from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Through
this quite simple strategy, the film suggests a method for reinforcing the
process of “unforgetting.” Two ways of “writing” the journey of migration
are combined, producing a hybrid text, partly indebted to the refugees’
testimonies but also drawing on a toolbox for understanding from the
noblest and most canonical works of the Western literary tradition. It is
quite true that some memories—autobiographical and collective—are also
introduced in the film, and they narrate the experience of forced migration
as something that has been historically shared. But we would suggest that
the main tool Redgrave uses to build a bridge between the experience of
crossing the Mediterranean Sea today and our Western imagination of the
journey is provided by Shakespeare, whose pastoral romance, among others,
has shaped the alphabet for writing a new “story” of migration within the
European context. This story is bound to address the issue of what Inghilleri
defines as “statelessness,” encouraging the “international community,” as she
says, to approach once and for all the endless nomadism of people who are
born stateless (Inghilleri 2017, 12).
Lampedusa (2015), written by the playwright and activist Anders
Lustgarten, develops around the issue of statelessness as possibly replaced
by what Conrad famously defined “the bond of the sea” (Conrad 1988, 7).
This militant play consists of two thematically interlaced but geographically
independent monologues. A man and a woman narrate their stories, each
framed in a specific context. Their two “worlds” of reference seem far apart
but in fact serve to develop the same line of reasoning. Both characters are
marginalized: Denise is a debt collector (and a British-Chinese student) in
Leeds, and Stefano is a fisherman now rescuing migrants’ corpses adrift in the
sea. Each of them bears the gaze of an outsider. From their liminal positions,
they consider the implications of the migration crisis and eventually make
choices based on their personal and keenly felt experience of isolation and
non-belonging.
Apparently very far from the Mediterranean Sea and its troubles, Denise
lives and works in Leeds, in one of the poorest areas of the UK. With the same
feeling as that of Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), the setting resonates with the
78 The Relocation of Culture

endless complaints of English people leading miserable lives on the margins

of the city. A mixed race herself, Denise is doomed to listen to the clients
whom she chases as a credit collector and who are often unable to repay their
loans. The atmosphere she breathes is literally soaked in hatred:

The hatred.
The hatred and the bitterness and the rage. The misplaced, trick, ignorant
rage (…) Blaming “fucking migrants” for every single thing we don’t like
about ourselves.
(Lustgarten 2015, 11)

Spectral presences in Leeds, the “fucking migrants” are tangible, intensely

physical presences to Stefano, a seaman in a family of seamen, living and
working in Lampedusa. In comparison with Denise, the character of Stefano
is more explicitly Mediterranean, both geographically and culturally. He
draws the very sense of his identity from his belonging to the “human
category” of sailors, the kind of people that, again as Conrad lyrically states,
are nomads but sedentary: “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and
their home is always with them—the ship—and so is their country—the
sea” (Conrad 1988, 9). Shaped according to this mold, Stefano also inherits
the remnants of a “colonial hydrarchy” (Gilroy 2014c, 51) that has defined
the journey of discovery by sea and the tales of loss related to an unwilling
exile. Though in a totally different context and framed in the sorrowful
contingencies of today, his narrative cannot avoid echoing the epic journey
of Ulysses, in its turn reemerging in English aestheticism from Walter Pater
to Oscar Wilde (Evangelista 2009) and before that surfacing in the troubled
seas and shipwreck depicted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11) and
in the Gothic yarn spun by Samuel T. Coleridge’s ancient mariner (The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798). As Stefano himself says, in the very first
lines of the play, “This is where the world began. This was Caesar’s highway,
Hannibal’s road to glory” (Lustgarten 2015, 3). In the face of this tradition,
the Italian protagonist of Lustgarten’s play proudly declares where he comes
from:

My father was a fisherman. And his father before him. And before and
before.
I always thought, always knew, I’d make my living at sea.
(Lustgarten 2015, 7)

This timeline endlessly unfolding backward was interrupted by a sharp

change that obliged Stefano to revise his whole life:
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 79

But the fish are gone. The Med is dead.

And my job is to fish out a very different kind of harvest.
(Lustgarten 2015, 7)

Stefano makes a living by recovering the corpses of migrants who were trying
to reach Europe but did not make it. His boat—his home and the symbolic
trope of life and survival—has become a sad repository of “things” with no
breath and no memory. Though “more varied than you think” (Lustgarten
2015, 3), the corpses soon reveal how close they are to becoming objects,
their metamorphosis into “a thing rather than a person, locked away from
literacy on the point of death, in a place where cognition—thinking—is not
a special door to doubt, method and being but a shortcut to the vulnerability
of non-being” (Gilroy 2014a).
Fully aware of the paradoxical nature of his work, Stefano inhabits an
interstitial space between life and death. And there he first sees Modibo, a
refugee from Africa. The development of their relationship offers a working
paradigm of the way in which some stereotypes operate. When Stefano first
meets him, he practices the art of “unseeing” the stranger, superimposing a
set of ready-made expectations onto his individual identity:

Stocky, wine-dark skin.

Nigerian, my guess.
I’ve got decent at telling the difference between Eritreans, Somalis,
Senegalese. I take a bit of pride in it, as it goes. We have bets on
who’s what and I’ve won a few drinks off it.
(Lustgarten 2015, 12)

When he fixes the boat’s engine, which Stefano and Salvo seem unable to
mend, Modibo reveals that he comes from Mali and is a mechanic. This is
the first in a row of small epiphanies that lead the two characters to share
the same limbo space and speak the same language, which is one of loss
and sympathy. Though incapable of fully understanding each other, they
gradually step into the territory of friendship, and the care they show to each
other culminates in Stefano’s decision to set out to sea on a stormy night to
rescue Modibo’s wife, Aminata. So eventually the same boat that had been
used to collect dead bodies is restored to its original function. It becomes
the shelter and the instrument that finally saves a life: a transitional territory
crossed by changing identities.
According to De Michelis’s recent study of Lustgarten’s play, the author’s
approach seems to resist the tendency to dismiss the discourse on migration
through the politics of body counts and instead “follows a partly diverging
80 The Relocation of Culture

perspective, premised on outrage but opening up to hope” (De Michelis

2017, 223). The two plotlines represent a progressive and honest attempt at
overcoming the mere bureaucratic mechanisms informing any discourse on
refuge and shelter and at building a new kind of solidarity and humanism.
Davide Enia walks the same path in Appunti per un naufragio (Notes for
a Shipwreck, 2017), which became a highly successful theatrical monologue
entitled L’ abisso (The Abyss, 2018). Enia chooses the same location as
Lustgarten—Lampedusa—to develop a very effective autobiographical
reflection on the experience of meeting the other in an emotionally
overloaded condition, both personal and collective. In the book as well as in
the play, the artist uses the autobiographical paradigm to devise an efficient
“code” for translating the borderline experiences he sees reflected in the eyes
and bodies of the people reaching the island after a terrible journey by sea.
The landing in Lampedusa becomes both physical and symbolical, and the
two dimensions are tightly connected. When he decides to go to Lampedusa
to see personally what is happening on the island, Enia is also facing the
illness of a beloved uncle—zio Beppe—and, more or less at the same time
and with no deliberate planning, he happens to rebuild his relationship
with his father, who becomes a silent companion on his journey. Both the
book and the play unfold as a cluster of experiences—quite different and
not all of them tightly related to the issues of migration—slowly coalescing
around one basic topic: human beings responding to two coexisting drives.
They want to survive at all costs and, whenever they can, they are naturally
led to help. On this ground, Enia tells with equal emotion the story of his
friends Paola and Melo, the owners of a bed-and-breakfast on the island,
who happen to save a number of migrants from drowning at night in front
of their house, and the slow decline of his beloved uncle, unable to give in
to his cancer.
Meaningfully, when trying to locate in time the specific landing they are
recounting to Davide and his father, Paola and Melo are unable to remember
when their decision to rescue the migrants happened. In recalling the year,
Paola is at a loss:

Non riesco a ricordare, davvero. Però potrei dirti esattamente i movimenti

che eseguii e dove ci incontrammo con Melo al centro del salone quando,
guardandoci negli occhi, ci siamo detti: “Chiudiamoci dentro.”
(Enia 2017, 38)

(I can’t remember, really. But I could tell you exactly the movements I
made and where I bumped into Melo, in the middle of the living room,
when, looking into each other’s eyes, we said: “Let’s lock ourselves in.”)
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 81

The facts of her “meeting the Others” seem out of time, and implicitly the
inability to locate them evokes the everlasting tragedy of forced migration in
the Mediterranean Sea. In the same way, Enia, when trying to make sense of
his experiences, goes back to the myth of Europa:

Una giovane fenicia fugge da Tiro e attraversa il deserto fin dove non
può proseguire perché davanti a lei si stende il mare. Per sua fortuna un
toro bianco la fa salire in groppa e, solcando le onde, la conduce a un
approdo sicuro sull’isola di Creta. La ragazza si chiama Europa. Questa
è la nostra origine. Siamo tutti figli di una traversata in barca.
(Enia 2017, 147)

(A young Phoenician girl escapes from Tiro and walks through the
desert until she must stop because the sea stretches out in front of her.
Luckily, a white bull allows her to get on his back and, crossing the
waves, leads her to a safe landing on the island of Crete. The girl’s name
is Europa. This is our origin. We are all children of migration by sea.)

Grande histoire and petits récits coalesce in the frantic attempt to restore the
identity of people who have become stateless. This attempt pushes toward
the creation of a new code in Western representations for current migrations
in the Mediterranean Sea, and this code attempts to translate the experience
of a journey that is reshaped in the foreign tongue of “Fortress Europe,”
hybridizing signs and meanings in a brand-new way.

3.4 The Issue of Respect

In a recent, unusual book, Mare al mattino (Morning Sea, 2015; first edition:
2011), Margaret Mazzantini tells the story of two women in a double
narrative connecting maternity and its failures to the migration crisis in the
Mediterranean Sea. In some respects, when reflecting on the gigantic tragedy
taking place before our eyes, Mazzantini adopts a code quite similar to the
one used by Vanessa Redgrave in her Sea Sorrow: she translates a double
journey of migration into two experiences she knows and can therefore
manage: maternity and exile. The protagonists of the narrative—split into
two parts in the same way as Lustgarten’s Lampedusa—belong to different
worlds, though they are both mothers and both live in exile. One of them,
Angelina, lives in an apparently protected and safe environment, while the
other, Jamila, is doomed and forced to migrate. Their symmetrical journeys
82 The Relocation of Culture

develop in opposite directions (Angelina is going to Africa, while Jamila

wants to get to Europe) and in highly different conditions (quite comfortable
ones for Angelina and totally precarious ones for Jamila). And yet they are
similar in their motivation: the desire to protect and save their offspring
at any cost. This supposedly universal drive is the shared ground between
them and what allows Mazzantini to be convincing in telling the story of
Jamila as well. Maybe this very drive toward a universal perception of what
is human in human beings—given in this case as the essence of maternity in
its bare bones—neutralizes the political substance of Jamila’ s story, in which
she is evidently not interested as an artist. At the same time, by comparing
two mothers from two different contexts, Mazzantini bypasses the risk of
appropriating the migrant’s experience and successfully translates a story that
is not hers or ours, keeping a lot of blank spaces to be left as untranslatable.
These semantic gaps belong to the specificity of each individual story and are
to be respected.
Significantly, Said states, “On the twentieth century scale, exile is neither
aesthetically nor ethically comprehensible: at most the literature about exile
objectifies an anguish and a predicament that most people rarely experience
at first hand” (Said 1984, 138). Here, he is speaking in the light of his own
experience of exile, which is different from the one marking, for example,
Mazzantini’s past.5 When narrating the story of other characters, be they
fictional or real, those artists who have gone through some condition of
uprooting, forced separation, unlooked-for relocation, unavoidably and
empathically tend to exploit their own feelings about exile, often using their
own emotions and conclusions as the signs of a code through which they filter
other narratives of exile. In so doing, they are offering a translation, which,
though partial and incomplete, serves the purpose of their representation,
provided both the author and the public keep in mind that this representation
is not totally true to the experience of forced migration described in their
texts. What is produced, therefore, is an incomplete translation, which is
certainly incomplete in several ways but which may be cognitively useful all
the same, depending on the way in which the encoding process is revised
and re-signified through the decoding process. These incomplete translations

5
We want to note that, though referring to Said and other political exiles, our work
focuses mostly on another kind of journey, one that is equally “forced,” but in a different
way. When we mention Said and even Mazzantini, we are perfectly aware of the different
conditions of their exile compared to the migrants currently moving through the
Mediterranean Sea or across the Mexican borders. And yet the experience of distance
from her motherland—Mazzantini was born in Dublin—apparently helps the novelist to
understand the condition of migration she is describing.
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 83

are meaningful precisely because of their incompleteness, since they signal a

difference that is not a wall, but a way to articulate national cultures and the
most enriching aspect of the ambiguous process called globalization.
What comes to the forefront, over and over again, is the “strategic
relevance of heterogeneity (…) across diverse geographical scale” (Mezzadra
and Neilson 2013, x). This relevance, well preserved in the limbo of a boat
crossing the Mediterranean Sea, tragically risks getting lost beyond the
borders of the ship, when the drowned bodies are made into numbers, whose
identity, nationality, religion, family, beliefs, expectations, hopes, and blood
ties are simply forgotten in death.
The other point then is: How can we keep memory and/or restore it,
saving the “strategic relevance of heterogeneity” in death, too? How can we,
as Westerners, remember that the drowned people were human beings? How
can we emphasize the shared ground rather than the different “languages”
in which representations of exile are “written”? The Italian playwright Lina
Prosa has recently written a trilogy whose first episode was performed in
2008 in France. Trilogia del naufragio (Trilogy of the Shipwreck) opens with a
play entitled Lampedusa Beach (2003),6 reporting on a shipwreck and on the
drowning of a migrant from Africa, Shauba. In this very simple and effective
parable of rejection, the female protagonist dies after falling into the sea
while she is trying to reach the beach at Lampedusa. Quite near to the shores
that mean safety and refuge for her, Shauba tells the audience of her own
death, poetically evoking a sea world that has suddenly become threatening:

Via, via marinaio dell’inferno.

Via da me.
La sola idea che in questa immensità opaca
qualcosa mi sfiori mi fa venire il crepacuore.
Mahama, lo sai, odio qualunque contatto fisico.
Sono troppo scoperta.
Non voglio morire così, di vergogna.
Mi vengono addosso pesci mai visti prima.
Cadaveri. Cadaveri umani
(Prosa 2013, 18)

6
Dating the play is quite difficult. The first version, 2003, was awarded (with slight
revisions) the Premio Nazionale Annalisa Scafi per il teatro civile in 2005 and the Premio
Nazionale Anima in 2007. The play was first performed at the Theatre des Bernardines,
in Marseilles, on February 5, 2008. Here we are referring to the Italian version published
by Editoria & Spettacolo in 2013.
84 The Relocation of Culture

(Away, sailor from Hell / Get away from me. / Only thinking that in this
dumb immensity / something can brush against me breaks my heart. /
Mahama, you know, I hate any physical contact / I am fully unveiled / I
don’t want to die this way, shameful. / Never-seen-before fish draw near
me. Corpses. Human corpses.)

When you are on a boat illegally crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the play
seems to suggest, you are re-semanticizing yourself as a foreigner and a
dangerous one, so your death is preliminarily defined as to be expected (if
not wished for) and your body automatically becomes disposable (so that
it can eventually become “useful” as food for the fish). The circumstances
of the shipwreck, in their “total simplicity,” present a fate that seems to be
preordained. There is no possibility of being saved, and therefore there
cannot be any resistance on the part of the victims:

Il naufragio è stato totale.

Ma è stato di una semplicità assoluta.
Lo sai perché? Non c’è stata tempesta.
Non c’è stata lotta, resistenza.
Nessuna manovra di perizia marinara.
Nessuna chiamata di capitano.
Nessun avviso. Nessuna campanella.
Non c’è stato innalzamento di onda.
Niente che riguardasse il mare.
Il mare è innocente
(Prosa 2013, 18–19)

(The shipwreck was total / but it was also totally simple. / Do you know
why? There was no storm, / there was no fight, no resistance. / No skilled
intervention of a trained sailor. / No call for a captain. / No notice. No
bells. / There were no raising waves. / Nothing concerning the sea. / The
sea is innocent.)

The sea is innocent, totally indifferent to the fate of the migrants. Their
ontology is revised as soon as they cross the border to Europe, or even before,
when they start on their journey. As Mezzadra and Neilson explain, “In so far
as it serves at once to make divisions and establish connections, the border is
an epistemological device, which is at work whenever a distinction between
subject and object is established” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 16). The dead
body of Shauba is made into an object lost at sea and, at best, rescued by a
sailor, as it happens in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa.
 Navigating the Mediterranean Sea 85

Shauba’s long monologue in Lampedusa Beach fully reveals the process

through which the Western world finally gets to face and represent, in its
own terms, the enormous tragedy of mass migration. The transformation of
the dead bodies into mere numbers rather than individual human beings
helps to sanitize the horror and certainly reduces the political impact of such
events. In representing Shauba’s death, Prosa restores the full individuality
of the drowned. The “victim” has a name, and she is a woman, a site of
relationships, memories, belonging, tastes, desires, expectations, plans, all of
them highly individual and all of them lost with her own death. In translating
the neutral body counts of the media reports into a specific woman narrating
her death while she collects her memories of the past and explains her desires
for the future, Prosa tries to show the tragedy in a different perspective, still
filtered through the Western gaze and yet capable of restoring the victim’s
individuality and complexity. It is quite true that, while describing the
experience of drowning, Prosa is universalizing Shauba’s story, more or less
in the same way as Mazzantini leans on the universal feminine experience of
motherhood in her novelette. But Prosa is much more physical, producing a
narrative that is quite strongly connected to Peter Brooks’s reflections on the
body and its suffering and death in Body Work:

If the sociocultural body clearly is a construct, an ideological product,

nonetheless we tend to think of the physical body as precultural and
prelinguistic: sensations of pleasure and especially of pain, for instance,
are generally held to be experiences outside language; and the body’s
end, in death, is not simply a discursive construct.
(Brooks 1993, 7)

Finally, in her representational choices, Prosa confirms the need—artistic if

not humane—to retune the relationship with the other, imagining the stranger
as an individual human being rather than as a lower order of existence and an
infrahuman entity (Gilroy 2014b, 19–50). In the first of his Tanner Lectures
on Human Values, meaningfully entitled “Suffering and Infrahumanity,”7
Paul Gilroy uncompromisingly states that colonial administration and the
power related to it, whatever its specific European origin, have always been
oriented primarily toward commercial purposes and solidly supported by
legal and military measures. The line of conduct easily identified as the
standard agenda of any imperialist enterprise has progressively removed
the humanity of the oppressed population, whose slavery could (and can)

7
The lecture was held at Yale University on February 21, 2014.
86 The Relocation of Culture

be more easily justified once you posit the subalterns as “naturally” inferior
(Gilroy 2014b, 23). This way of thinking, now and then supported by popular
discourse, needs to be refused. Within this perspective, literature and the arts
can be extremely effective in addressing the concerns of both the migrants
and the hosting communities, rejecting the language of fear and rejection,
and acknowledging a common factor belonging to the human condition
(Vallorani 2017, 53–5). This process may remobilize those new “modes of
representation of otherness” that Bhabha posits as urgently needed for a
political epistemology capable of renouncing the protective stereotypes
applied by Westerners to any form of otherness (Bhabha 2004, 94–120). As
we know very well, those stereotypes are devised to transform the human
subject (by nature unique and individualized) into a one-dimensional
profile, exchangeable and superimposable (Bhabha 2004, 95), a translation of
otherness that serves to reassure the West but that ends up by being deeply
mystifying. Consequently, and going back to Apter (Apter 2008, 583), the
“ineffable textual essence” that is the kernel of the migrants’ experience must
simply be respected in terms of social praxis, political contexts, and cultural
backgrounds (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 271) and is only translatable up
to a point and only by keeping in mind a whole set of relevant differences.
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente Rafael introduces the notion of “aporias
of translation” as “a kind of semantic bouleversement, the sense of upheaval
whereby the endlessly enfolded meanings of particular events will always
make any discourse feel unfinished and incomplete” (Rafael 2016, 18).
Switching to a code different from words, the difficulty remains the same.
Shipwreck (2014) is a fifteen-minute, award-winning documentary that
portrays the consequences of the same events triggering de Kerangal’s A
ce stade de la nuit. The tragedy occurring on October 3, 2013, off the coast
of Lampedusa is told here mostly through images and words collected by
an impassive camera. When filming one of the survivors narrating his own
tragic experience while walking through the abandoned wreckage on the
island, Morgan Knibbe, the director, producer, and editor of the film, tries
to be a non-intrusive presence. And yet the European point of view is very
much present. Less literary and speculative than de Kerangal, Knibbe adopts
the attitude of the reporter so as to produce “documents” that speak for
themselves, only to discover that images themselves are translated, for, as
Said notes, “[e]xile can never be discussed neutrally” (Said 1984, 140).
 4

The Gaze of Medusa

Rather than dodging translation they try to keep being translated

—Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated, 2015

4.1 “I Don’t Want to Go to Europe”

In 2014, Morgan Knibbe released what was in all respects his debut film,
Those Who Feel the Fire Burning. Though it included sequences from the
award-winning Shipwreck, the operation grounding the film was totally
different and the chosen point of view—that of a wandering specter—shaped
a brand-new kind of discourse, combining Knibbe’s uncompromising and
almost brutal facticity with a poetic perspective that smoothly transformed
a potential “reportage” into magical storytelling. The opening sequence of
the film, shot by a drone, provides fragments of a shipwreck. While the
camera bobs along following the oscillation of the boat in a storm, a family
tries to survive, and at a climactic point the grandfather falls from the
boat and drowns. The time/space between the child saying, “I don’t want
to go to Europe” and the old man wondering, “Is this paradise?” a few
instants after drowning defines the film’s narrative pact with the audience.
The story—largely based on events that are tragic and true—is going to be
told through the gaze of a spirit. In fact, this gaze transforms what could
be a document or a testimony into a vision filtered through a very precise
interpretation.
Our point in this chapter is well illustrated by this reference to Knibbe’s
choices in his film. The text in itself—both thematically and stylistically—
navigates between the realistic and the visionary impulse, successfully
combining the two. Patricia Aufderheide, introducing her reflection on
the so-called mimetic flaw of documentary filmmaking, points to some
issues that may usefully be applied to our approach to different kinds
of visual text. As Aufderheide clearly states, “Reality is not what is out
there, but what we know, understand, share with each other of what is out
88 The Relocation of Culture

there” (Aufderheide 2007, 5), and so documentary filmmakers—as well as

photoreporters—should be considered storytellers rather than journalists
(Aufderheide 2007, 1). Consequently, they do not need to bribe the audience
with a pretension to reality, which is not implicit in the tools and methods
of representation, but rather they should keep to their original mandate of
“making poetry where no poet has gone before, and where no ends, sufficient
for the purposes of art, are easily observed. It requires not only taste but also
inspiration, which is to say a very laborious, deep-seeing, deep-sympathising
creative effort indeed” (Corner 1996, 13).
The language of images is not articulated. Even so, when we use them, like
any other kind of “code,” we are exploiting an approach built in analogy with
what Bakhtin defines as “creative understanding,” a process that requires
some kind of distance and the condition of being “located outside the object”
of representation (Bakhtin 1986, 5–7). Loredana Polezzi, in her brilliant
essay on translation and migration, goes back to Bakhtin’s “outsidedness”
(Polezzi 2012, 351) when she shows that the role of the migrant and the
cultural interpreter can enrich the host culture rather than threaten its
stability. We want to return to the same concept and use it in a different
way. Working on visual representation and mostly documentary filmmaking
and photography, we will focus on a specific aspect of these techniques—
the physical distance required from the object represented—and we will
consider the ways in which this distance (this “outsidedness”) implies and
invokes a “translation” both in the act of coding the message and in the effort
of decoding it. Like any other kind of text, visual texts are reality-shaping.
When focusing on a specific topic, for example, forced migrations in the
Mediterranean Sea, the visual artist experiences a kind of “outsidedness” that
is partly indebted to what the African American artist Kara Walker defines
as the “sidelong glance” (Shaw 2004)—a glance that is indirect and therefore
can see otherwise invisible things and people. In devising an answer to the
male, colonial gaze, Walker puts forward a representational strategy able
to resist the traditional modalities of vision and create a new, decolonized
alphabet.
Also in the case of images, the expectations (and therefore the point of
view/gaze) of the audience play a relevant role in the process of coding/
decoding the message. In the unusual book-length essay Draw Your Weapons,
Sarah Sentilles describes what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth
century during the first French colonization of Algerian territories:

French colonists arrived in Algeria accompanied by photographers,

who planned to photograph harems to create images of the women
they wanted to colonize. But instead of harems, the photographers
 The Gaze of Medusa 89

encountered veiled women, their bodies hidden from the cameras.

Unable to photograph what they’d imagined, the photographers grew
frustrated and hired models to take the veiled women’s place. The
photographers set up backdrops, transformed their studios into harems
and bedrooms and prisons and living rooms, and though their images
were staged, though the models were paid to pose, were dressed and
undressed and dressed again, the pictures were presented as if they
captured the real thing. Women lounging on carpets. Women standing,
naked, behind bars. Women veiled, revealing only their eyes and
breasts.
(Sentilles 2017, 47–8)

What was supposed to be a document thus became the fictional narrative

of what the Westerners expected Algerian women to be. The truth was not
relevant for the photographers in their process of encoding messages for a
specific kind of public, which, by the way, shared the same culture as the
authors of the photos. Taken in between the need to be faithful to reality
and the wish to please their audience, they simply used their artistic tool—
photography—to meet the expectations of the audience that was going to
decode their visual discourse. In its turn, this process of decoding produced
a definite message about Algerian women, which, though totally fictional,
was sold as true, exploiting the supposed testimonial power of photographic
representations. The “quantity” of consensus may reverse the “quality” of
a message. The Algerian poet and literary critic Malek Alloula reflects on
how intensely these colonial postcards influenced the West’s supposed (and
stereotypical) familiarity with the colonial space and culture. “The postcard,”
writes Alloula, “is everywhere, covering all the colonial space, immediately
available to the tourist, the soldier, the colonist. It is at once their poetry
and their glory captured for the ages; it is also their pseudo-knowledge of
the colony. It produces stereotypes in the same manner of great seabirds
producing guano. It is the fertilizer of the colonial vision” (Alloula 1986, 4).1
Translation in its wider semantic implications is clearly at stake here. The
photographers complied with the Western public’s expectations, translating
the real Algerian women into the familiar image held by their colonizers.
To return their true meaning to these images, Alloula reminds us, a double
operation is needed: “to uncover the nature and the meaning of the colonialist
gaze; then to subvert the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the
bodies of women” (Alloula 1986, 5). If it is true that “[t]he objective of

1
Part of the quotation also appears in Sentilles (Sentilles 2017, 47–8).
90 The Relocation of Culture

colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate

types on the basis of racial origin in order to justify conquest and to establish
systems of administration and instruction” (Bhabha 2004, 101), this purpose
found strong support in the notion of visual representation as an objective
testimony to the facts. This feeling grounds the first reaction of the viewer
to a photographic report or to a documentary film: these texts act as an
eyewitness’ report and are therefore true.
The tendency toward a preliminarily oriented decoding of such texts
is strengthened by the possibility of instantaneously circulating any visual
image and presenting it as a document: more than any words could do, it
is automatically perceived as direct evidence. Consequently, the eye of the
photographer/filmmaker becomes like the eye of God. It imposes a definite
reading, providing a supposedly objective representation while in fact acting
on a highly subjective basis to produce a specific portrayal that is unavoidably
an interpretation of the real, not the real itself.
Similarly, though with a different representational purpose, the shared
culture of the expected audience may be consciously exploited to orient the
decoding of a visual text, supporting the understanding of a discourse that
would be otherwise unintelligible (like the experience of migration if you
are not a migrant). What is often not immediately evident to the audience
(and sometimes the critics) is that photographers/filmmakers exploit codes
that are, at the same time, individual (and related to their personal talent),
technical (because they result from specific training), and cultural (relying
on particular values). In most cases, this exploitation becomes a tool used
with full awareness by the author of the visual text in order to get to a more
complete understanding “through analogy.”
Solo andata (One-Way Only, Erri De Luca and Alessandro Gassman
2014),2 for example, is a short film combining images, music, and a poetry
reading by Erri De Luca, a famous Italian novelist and artist, whose political
engagement is well known. In this specific case, the narrative plays on the
analogies between Italian people as migrants at the end of the nineteenth

2
Erri De Luca mostly publishes with Feltrinelli, one of Italy’s leading publishing houses,
and he was the protagonist of a quite famous lawsuit related to the public position he
took, some years ago, against a great project that clearly profited from a wide network
of political collusion. He was subsequently acquitted, but the case triggered support
by many Italian and French artists and intellectuals (https://www.theguardian.com/
world/2015/oct/19/erri-de-luca-acquittal-turin-lyon-rail-line). The short video we refer
to is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQwe2DNvSZ8.
All translations from Italian and French are ours, unless otherwise indicated.
 The Gaze of Medusa 91

century and the African people shipwrecked on the Italian coasts today.
The protagonist—an ordinary man fishing on a beach and cherishing the
memory of his expatriate mother while looking at her photograph—proves
generous enough to save drowning refugees. Only when they are safe does he
suddenly realize the analogy between the woman he has rescued and his own
mother who migrated so many years before. The short video plays lyrically
on the interweaving of the sad memories of an ordinary man and his desire
to help drowning refugees.
Solo andata attempts to achieve a double result: the authors of the short
film wish to normalize the migrants, who are otherwise either criminalized
or pitied by the media, and also try to make it possible for Italian people to
understand them, translating their experience of migration into manageable
terms. In so doing, they show how far and how persistently translation is a
culture-bound process, which is unavoidably political in that it affects the
cultural agenda of any community (Polezzi 2012, 354). On the other hand, if
it is true that agency is the key factor in the interaction between translation
and migration (Cronin 2006, 40–5; Polezzi 2012, 348), it is desirable for
migrants to be given the possibility to “act” their own self-translation or at
least for new tools of representation to be devised so as to reduce the impact
of the Westerner’s interpretation to the minimum. Though fully aware of the
limits of self-translation (Hokenson and Munson 2007), we do believe that
the migrants’ own voices can and must offer crucial perspectives and fill in
the relevant bits in the puzzle of the other.
We will consider the possibilities described above in the following
sections. In 4.2, we will work on the ways in which images may suggest
a decoding path in terms of Western traditions and cultures, counting
on a series of references in the mind of the public that are consciously
or unconsciously taken for granted. In 4.3, we will move to examples
where familiarity and lack thereof are exploited as methods to translate
the experience of migration for a Western audience. Finally, in 4.4 we
will consider a photographic project that endeavors to give the migrants
the possibility to use their own voice/gaze to translate the experience of
migration through images. In all cases, we will analyze the chosen texts as
cultural discourses, so that any observations on the technical, purely filmic,
or photographic features of the texts are considered only when functional
to our approach.
Eventually, although deeply aware that any text—be it in words, sounds,
colors, or images—must consider the expectations of the addressee, we
can nonetheless point out the inherent ambiguity of images, in particular,
92 The Relocation of Culture

documentary images. Berger famously states that “[s]eeing comes before

words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak” but also that “[w]e
only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice” (Berger 2008, 15). And,
we would add, what we choose to see is in large part influenced by the culture
we have grown up in.

4.2 Pics and Other Objects

The Game is the latest ongoing multimedia project by Mario Badagliacca,3

a young Sicilian photographer, and it deals with the Balkan route, officially
closed by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the
EU authorities (and therefore not covered by the media), though still widely
used. Thousands of migrants keep on facing a journey across massively
militarized borders, waiting for their turn to reach their destination, a
destination that is often not (to be) reached. As a visual ethnographic project,
The Game seems to evoke what Roland Barthes defines an “infra-savoir,” the
unstable combination of a set of “incomplete objects” that the spectators are
required to interpret on the ground of their cognitive expectations (Barthes
1980, 54). Moreover, some of Badagliacca’s photos, as we shall see, openly
suggest or imply a reference to Renaissance painting and more specifically
to the tradition of Italian religious art, a huge reservoir of shared knowledge,
both aware and unaware.
The Game is organized into six chapters. Chapter Three, entitled “The
Jungle,” includes the photo of a migrant that is quite easily identifiable
as the “re-coding” of a very famous painting in late medieval European
art history. The position of the subject, a cloth covering his head, and
his hand extended forward (see Figure 4.1) call to mind the image of the
Virgin portrayed in Antonello da Messina’s Annunciata di Palermo (1475)
(see Figure 4.2). Although the direction of the gaze is not the same, the
subject is not the Virgin, the context is clearly different, and the extended

3
https://www.mariobadagliacca.com/about. Specific projects are here: https://www.
mariobadagliacca.com/projects-r (last accessed: August 24, 2020).
 The Gaze of Medusa 93

Figure 4.1 Mario Badagliacca, A Pakistani Man at Belgrade Waterfront—Serbia,

2016.
94 The Relocation of Culture

Figure 4.2 Antonello da Messina, Annunciata di Palermo, 1475.

hand is not suspended in an incomplete blessing but clutching a mobile

phone (probably the most vital object for a person facing the journey), the
analogies are simply too many to be ignored. They help Western viewers
(and probably the photographer) make sense of, and dignify, something they
could not otherwise understand, translating the experience of migration into
a familiar code. The meaning of the image in and of itself is the result of a
 The Gaze of Medusa 95

process of multiple translations. The most famous of the Sicilian painter’s

work “translated” the biblical theme of the Annunciation into the image
of a simple woman, taken by surprise by an angel (who is invisible in the
painting), which involves her in a fate that she cannot resist. Badagliacca, in
his turn, reproduces the same intimate atmosphere, transforming the viewer
into a witness of an equally unwanted, though profoundly different, fate.
The operation seems to go back to the most ancient tradition of British
photography and more specifically to the portraits made by Margaret Julia
Cameron of maidens, servants, and humble people as saints and mythological
figures (Cameron and Hamilton 1996, 40–9). We may add that Badagliacca is
not new to this kind of project. His website attests to his ability to transform
a work, to document an underrepresented tragedy by turning it into a
form of art, where the gaze of the photographer is the hub around which the
representation develops. They are performative versions of the most effective
form of resistance to what postmodern theorists often fall prey to: the kind
of “image fatigue” that eventually renders the visual horrors filling the world
invisible (Azoulay 2008, 11).
In practice, the language that Badagliacca uses is effective and hits home.
The photograph we selected, in particular, was included in an exhibition
entitled Altri volti (Other Faces, December 6–9, 2018).4 The public soon
identified the analogy between Badagliacca’s photograph and the painting by
Antonello da Messina. When asked about his intention, however, the Sicilian
photographer declared the analogy was not consciously looked for:

I remember that I was collecting photos for MSF, whose contact person
had put me in charge of documenting, officially and photographically,
the conditions of the migrants at the Waterfront in Belgrade. I was
photographing quickly because the sun was setting down and it was
getting dark. Wandering along the border, I found some guys at the
entrance of a warehouse, sitting in a circle, on makeshift chairs, and I
took that photo instinctively. Then I went on, I didn’t even stop to talk
much with them (which I usually do). Just a few nods and that was all.
I took a look at the photo once I got home. I hardly look at the photos
immediately after taking them. I don’t want to spoil the magic of seeing
the photos afterwards. It’s like opening gifts. Only then, I realized there
was something familiar, but I could not put a finger on it until someone

4
The exhibition was held in Piacenza (IT), at the venue of the association Amici dell’Arte
and in collaboration with the Cultural Association TessereTrame, founded by the Italian
writer Barbara Garlaschelli. It included twenty photos that inspired twenty short stories,
collected in a volume bearing the same title.
96 The Relocation of Culture

pointed out the analogy. I did not decide to organize my photo on the
ground of the painting. It was totally unaware.5

It may be said, therefore, that Badagliacca’s translation of the suspended

condition of the migrant happens by a sort of cultural accident: some
reference hidden in his cultural formation, cropped up and guided him. As
a consequence, the photo captures the semantic and symbolic environment
shared by some European cultures, relating it to a common, if general,
religious reservoir of symbols, grounding his “translation” of his subject (a
migrant on the Balkan border) and at the same time introducing a sense of
uniqueness that is bound to be clear to anyone familiar with the “original”: the
unique portrayal of the Virgin by a renowned painter. Though not necessarily
identifiable in terms of a specific reference to Antonello da Messina and his
work, the photo will probably raise a feeling of familiarity, which in itself may
build a bridge between different cultures and experiences. The photographer’s
“language” will be understood through analogy and translated into what
seems to be a comprehensible “interpretation” of the issue of migration
not only over the Balkan borders, but also in a more universal perspective.
A visual message glossed as such is bound to make it easier, for people who
have never experienced any kind of migration, to gain some awareness of
what is lived through by forced immigrants and refugees.
It needs to be reminded, however, that this kind of “translation by
analogy” is not always positively oriented, and remains in fact ambiguous
in its consequences. Broadly speaking, it is the ground in which the colonial
enterprise is rooted. Boehmer analyzes it from a postcolonial perspective,
explaining that the colonial gaze is “made manifest in the activities of
investigation, examination, inspection, peeping, poring over, which were
accompaniments to the colonial penetration of a country” (2005, 68). Boehmer
goes back to the frame of reference that European cultures share, which
allows us to consider incoming migrants in many ways, mostly negative. In its
most prejudiced manifestations, the process is driven by a colonial tendency
to “domesticate” the aliens, as to fit them into our stereotypical views of the
other. We want the strangers to become familiar as to be able to cope with
them. However, making them familiar, we fatally betray their true identities.
Thus the Western gaze works like that of Medusa, making the object of
representation into a fictional entity, far removed from the real world. In terms
of encoding, this was the case with the French photographers in Algeria. But
according to Paul Gilroy, the same attitude emerges in the decoding process

5
This answer was given by Badagliacca himself by email, when we addressed the question
(September 1, 2020).
 The Gaze of Medusa 97

applied by many Western “liberal sympathizers to a postcolonial émigré élite”

who, when approaching the representation of the dead or suffering body of
the other, react by showing the kind of “cheap pseudo-solidarities” that Gilroy
identifies “as an inadequate salve for real pain” (Gilroy 2000, 6).
The issue is complex, and there are two sides to it. On the one hand, translating
the image of the stranger into one’s own (Western) terms may neutralize the
testimonial and political power of the image itself. On the other, as Gilroy
maintains, there’s no understanding without sympathy, which etymologically
means suffering together (Gilroy 2014). We must remember of course that
sympathy is an ambiguous tool. It may lead us closer to understanding or it may
remove the specificity of what or who is sympathized with, drawing us back to
a stereotypical interpretation of the other. But it is nevertheless an extremely
effective “entry point” to approach any condition totally unfamiliar to us.
In Fanon’s interpretation of the relationship between the colonizer and the
colonized, the stereotype is posited as inherently misleading. Its negative aspect
is mistakenly considered as deriving from a false representation of a given reality.
Fanon argues that the stereotype has a negative impact on the process of knowing
the other because it simplifies and petrifies something that is meant to be received
as a performative identity, in which the play of differences is basic (Fanon 1952,
78–82). Theoretically, this notion of an act that freezes the object it addresses is
quite easily applicable to the art of producing a photographic representation of
the real. According to Barthes, photography necessarily represents “ce qui a été”
(“what used to be”) and therefore it takes “la voie de la certitude: l’essence de la
photographie est de ratifier ce qu’elle représente” (“the way of certainty: the essence
of photography is to ratify what it represents”) (Barthes 1980, 133). Between
stereotype and photography, there seems to be a shared tendency toward fixity
and stability that may deeply hinder the understanding of something that is in
(fast) progress. But of course, it depends on what you do with photography: it is a
language, and you may inflect it in different ways when trying to translate the real.
The artistic project I Càrmeni. Ritratti improbabili (I Càrmeni. Unlikely
Portraits) (Mario De Carolis 2013)6 is based on photography. It works—both
symbolically and pragmatically—on an unusual version of the process of
mimicry. De Carolis (1957–2018) was an eclectic talent, basically a painter,
but also a sculptor and a photographer. He spent some years on a cooperative
project in Venezuela, and on his return he began his visual research on
“transcultural passages” (as he named them) in Italian society. I Càrmeni starts
with a patient, time-consuming, and repeated effort to gain familiarity with the
migrants in the neighborhood of San Faustino in Brescia (Italy). When they
first meet him, people do not even know that De Carolis is a photographer

6
Details on the project are available here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/project/i-carmeni/
98 The Relocation of Culture

and an artist. He becomes an accepted presence in the neighborhood before

starting the project, and therefore his initial interaction with the migrants
living in the area is casual and “free.” In the meanwhile, of course, he succeeds
in exploring an urban multicultural environment that is almost unique in
Italy—particularly after the recent dismantling of the Riace experiment by the
former Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini7—where a number of
different ethnicities live side by side, peacefully coexisting, providing mutual
help, and actively working for the good of the community as a whole. Not until
he had become a familiar presence and a friend to many of the people living
in San Faustino did De Carolis begin his photographic work, which involved
shooting a number of close-ups. The photographic portraits were then printed
on sheets of drilled aluminum and eventually laid on Plexiglas mirrors.
The outcome of this process was revealing. The act of observing each portrait
has a “multiplying” quality: the viewers see not only the face of the subject—who
is a foreigner, and visibly so—but also their own face, reflected through the holes
in the plates. In blending into each other, the two faces necessarily produce a
new image, resulting from the unstable and provisional combination of the West
and the rest in a transcultural tension within a highly dynamic representation
of the contemporary drive toward globalization. In combining two faces, De
Carolis symbolically evokes the fluctuating and unpredictable combination of
multiple histories, cultures, experiences, and, more often than not, ethnicities.
There is a peculiar connection between Badagliacca’s and De Carolis’s
work, though the two artists never met. When speaking of the origin of his
project, De Carolis explained that he was inspired by Antonello da Messina’s
painting, the one we mentioned above as a (mostly hidden) reference for
The Game. The Annunciata di Palermo (1476) functions differently for
Mario De Carolis, for whom the painting played a very intentional role in
his work. He said in fact that, in his project as well as in the Annunciata, the
object of his representation was someone who was not there: the angel in
the case of Antonello da Messina’s painting and the mixed-up identity that
is progressively taking shape in Europe primarily as a consequence of mass
migration in De Carolis’s photographic project.8

7
The former minister ordered the shutting down of the most celebrated model of
integration, which was instituted in the small town of Riace, in Calabria, and overseen by
its mayor, Domenico Lucano. Lucano was placed under house arrest and then forced to
leave the town. The fact that he had won international prizes for his integration project,
apparently, could not stop the project of dismantling. When he eventually returned to
Riace, Lucano started rebuilding the old project, which is at the moment only partly
operational.
8
De Carolis explains the project here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/project/i-carmeni/.
Some videos are available here: http://www.mariodecarolis.it/video-gallery/ (last accessed:
September 11, 2020). The ones devoted to I Càrmeni may help to understand how the
“mirror effect” works. The videos were shot and edited in collaboration with CTU—
Università degli Studi di Milano.
 The Gaze of Medusa 99

So without realizing it, De Carolis produced an example of the kind of

approach Bhabha suggested in his seminal “The Other Question”:

My reading of the colonial discourse suggests that the point of

intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive
or negative, to the understanding of the process of subjectification made
possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.
(Bhabha 2004, 95)

Bhabha completes the articulation of this line of thought in The Location of

Culture. When trying to clarify his “anatomy of colonial discourse,” he mentions
the stereotype as “an arrested, fetishistic” mode of representation (Bhabha 2004,
109), symbolically replicating the formative mirror phase of the subject, any
subject, in the process of growing up. In this mirror phase, two different drives
interact: “narcissism” (because I—the Western subject—like what I see) and
“aggressivity” (because I want to appropriate what I see). In the strategy of colonial
power, the stereotype posits the same kind of duplicity: “[I]t gives knowledge
of difference and simultaneously disavows or masks it. Like the mirror phase
‘the fullness’ of the stereotype—its image as identity—is always threatened by
lack” (Bhabha 2004, 110). De Carolis directly engages with this sort of reflection
producing a kind of representation that destroys any possibility of fixing the
image of the other through a stereotypical representation. In his portraits,
the viewers are necessarily involved, as they must complete the meaning of
the work. And if the viewers, as often happens, are Westerners, the experience
of viewing produces multiple and unstable “translations” of the Western
identity of today, an identity conceived as a mosaic of local and individual bits
and pieces, collected while moving from one place to another and interlacing
multiple cultural and emotional relationships. De Carolis clearly exploits the
notion of reflection as something more than a mere duplication: it is an act
triggering proliferation and the production of uncountable new identities that
will later combine, in their turn, with other identities, determining new forms
of hybridization, in a transcultural play that is endlessly changing. The notion
of identity we are referring to, therefore, is performative and projected outward
toward many possible translations of itself in different linguistic and cultural
contexts. The endless instability of globalized identities is in fact drawing new
geographies where border-crossing is not only possible but necessary.
In the beautiful volume devoted to Sebastiao Salgado and his art, Eduardo
Galeano, one of the two editors, remarks that Salgado’s photographs seem
to watch the public and to directly address the viewers in an extremely
provocative and involving way. Mario De Carolis’s project deliberately
develops this symbolic reflection into a specific artistic practice, which hints
100 The Relocation of Culture

at a possible new way of producing portraits of the other, and in fact reflects
on the very notion of otherness.

4.3 Familiarizing/Defamiliarizing

It should be clear by now that the visual translations of the migration process
and of its agents often imply a double-sided process of inscription and
estrangement. When we decide to connect a totally unfamiliar experience and a
representation that is familiar to us, we may follow two paths. We may show the
similarities existing between, say, the migration of our Sicilian grandfathers to
the US and that of the African immigrants to Europe; by this process, we make
ourselves and our public more emotionally aware of the conditions enforcing
migration today. Or we may refer to something familiar—be it an experience,
an image, or a text—adapting it as to show how a shared cultural reference
may help us to understand that the other is a human being as well. Michel
Foucault draws an essential link between power and knowledge, presenting
them as the two basic aspects in his notion of discourse. This term, as Foucault
intends it, applies to any text of any kind, which may become both a tool of
oppression and a strategy of resistance (Foucault 1998, 138–41). Power does
not work in the form of a chain: it circulates (Foucault 1982, 417–32), and this
is made possible by the unpredictable ways in which language (any language)
is encoded in a message (any kind of message) and subsequently decoded.
Stuart Hall reinforces this concept, also stressing the active role of both the
addresser and the addressee, as well as the many factors that work to “encode”
a message (Hall 1993, 90–8). The meaning of any text is therefore unstable
and is endlessly shaped and reshaped by both the authors and the receivers
(who often become new authors in their turn). We will see in what way, in
the case of visual texts related to migration, the twin notions of familiarity
and unfamiliarity play an active role in both the process of encoding and the
process of decoding, triggering semantic interferences that are often beyond
the author’s intention. In such an emotionally overloaded “discourse,” the
extent to which the meaning expressed by the author is familiar enough to
be identified or is sufficiently estranged as to raise the addressee’s awareness
about the implied meaning of the text appears to be a preliminary step in
facilitating or hindering the authors’ and the receiver’s ability to make sense
of a discourse.
Our first visual text is a very famous one: the photograph of Aylan Kurdi,
the three-year-old Syrian refugee drowned in Bodrum. He was trying to
reach a safe haven off the coast of Turkey and died with his five-year-old
 The Gaze of Medusa 101

brother and his mother. His father survived to tell the story. Nilüfer Demir
photographed the toddler’s body on the beach of Bodrum, a resort normally
crowded with holidaymakers during the day, but a place where migrants’
boats often try to avoid coastal patrols at night. For several reasons, most of
them unfathomable, the photo soon became widely circulated on the web: it
was endlessly shared on social networks and appeared to become an icon of
the vulnerability and innocence of the migrants killed. In a way, the image
perfectly fits the Western imagination of the journey in search of refuge, and
it worked extremely well in attracting attention and triggering reactions
of condemnation and solidarity. Images are texts. They result from the
regulated combination of signs belonging to a familiar code. In the same way
as a written text, they “function” if they successfully exploit the language they
choose and, in an international environment, when they can be translated,
more or less efficiently, into other languages and cultures.
What happens with this photograph is quite simple. The photographer
is a Turkish photojournalist, born in 1986. She is quite young, well trained,
and belongs to a non-European culture by birth, although she functions
in an international context. She consequently refers to a cultural frame of
reference that is not necessarily analogous to the paradigm familiar to most
European addressees. In practice, when taking the photograph, she was
probably not fully aware of the steps marking its “translation” into contexts
other than the Turkish one. Analyzing the way in which the photograph is
encoded—whether in full awareness or unconsciously—one can easily trace
many “signs” deeply rooted in Western cultures. Even though it is clear from
the chronicle of the shipwreck that the drowned child is a stranger, aspects
of the photograph make him appear familiar to the European viewer. For
one, Aylan Kurdi has a light complexion and is dressed in Western clothes.
Second, the beach looks familiar: it is in fact a resort that is quite popular
with Western tourists. Aylan’s body is perfectly intact: no wounds, no blood,
no signs of violence; he could easily be sleeping. On the whole, he could be
the viewer’s own child, who has fallen asleep on the beach during a holiday;
his death is experienced as a tragedy because he is so similar to our children
and because most of us (Europeans) have experienced a holiday in a place
like this.
This sort of everyday familiarity is unconsciously reinforced, as the young
researcher Giulio Dalvit suggests, by a clear reference to Western religious
imagery. Aylan’s body, while “peacefully sleeping” on the beach, seems familiar
because it replicates the image of the sacrificial lamb in a very famous painting
by Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei (1640) (see Figure 4.3), many copies
of which are exhibited in Catholic churches in Europe (Dalvit 2015).
102 The Relocation of Culture

Figure 4.3 Francisco de Zurbaràn, Ecce Agnus Dei, 1640.

The religious reference belongs to a symbolic universe that is perhaps most

likely to produce an impact on the European viewer. At the same time, the
hidden reference to a familiar work of art adds a sort of narrative quality to the
mimetic flavor of the text, transforming the photographer into a storyteller.
For these reasons, the photo inspired a huge wave of sympathetic reactions,
all of them supported by the possibility of “translating” the sorrowful fate of
a Syrian child into the unbearable tragedy of a child’s drowning that could—
theoretically—happen in any family. Western spectators feel a familiarity
that they cannot explain because they automatically translate the image into
something they know and that replicates the sacrifice of an innocent victim,
naturally bound to raise sympathy and compassion. The covert religious
reference multiplies the effect of the photograph and mobilizes moral
consciousness, “making the death of a migrant child—not the first and,
sadly and infuriatingly, not the last—interesting to Western eyes” (Vallorani
2018, 116).
In the spiral movement marking the dynamic processes of encoding and
decoding as defined by Stuart Hall (1993), Demir’s photo becomes the canvas
for a surprising number of new translations/adaptations that were triggered
by the process of making the original picture available on the web. Whether
these “translations” were produced by underground artists, by ordinary
users of the web or internationally famous figures, what is quite clear in
this endless process of circulation and translation is that each new version
 The Gaze of Medusa 103

Figure 4.4 Rohit Chawla, Portrait of Ai Weiwei, 2016.

contains the original text but also translates it according to the shared code
of the imagined addressee.
Rohit Chawla’s photo (Figure 4.4) explicitly translates Kurdi’s death
into a different narrative experience (Ai Weiwei replacing the child, a
stony beach replacing the sandy one, and a black-and-white photograph
in place of the color one), while the drawing by Eduardo Salles (Figure 4.5)
suggests the impermanence of memory. In the same way, the anonymous
Photoshop (Figure 4.6) that, soon after the event, kept popping up in
various versions on social media (mostly on FB) effectively symbolizes
the absence of a true identity in the image of the migrant child, implying
both negative and positive consequences. In all three cases, the issues that
are raised have something to do with the universal character of Aylan
Kurdi’s tragedy, the need to preserve our memory of it, and the idea that
there is a “hierarchy of grief,” according to which “some lives count more
than others” (Butler 2004, 76) and that needs to be resisted and ultimately
reversed.
“Every image embodies a way of seeing,” claims Berger (Berger 2008, 13).
And our contemporary way of seeing migrants often rearticulates a deeply
rooted set of Western stereotypes. In suggesting a possible understanding/
translation of the experience of migration, the image fixes the identity of
104 The Relocation of Culture

Figure 4.5 Eduardo Salles, La memoria colectiva es de corto plazo, 2015.

Figure 4.6 Anonymous Facebook post (October 2015).

 The Gaze of Medusa 105

the migrant, making it less slippery, easier to grasp, quicker currently for
Westerners to understand. This is the process at work in Demir’s photo of
Aylan Kurdi. When Chawla, Salles, and the anonymous artist take the same
image and modify it reshaping its original meanings and estranging what was
believed to be familiar, another method of translation is put into practice, its
hub being not familiarity but foreignization. Both strategies may be perfectly
functional in translating the experience of migration through images. They
are different but oriented toward the same goal.
As Butler explains in Precarious Lives, we need “to establish modes of
public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human
within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has
become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism, or
fully obliterated, where both alternatives turn out to be the same” (Butler
2004, 147). Seeing is not a straightforward, unmediated process, and this is
true for both photography and documentary filmmaking. In both cases and
in the field of migration studies, the issues of biopolitics and precariousness
tend to be progressively simplified and ultimately erased by the propensity to
replicate a sadly familiar story, where the features of the individual victims
are not given space, thus reducing the interest of the audience, which tends
to see numbers rather than people. Again, estranging the traditional codes
may help produce a more effective translation of the experience of forced
migration.
The short film L’estate vola (Summer Flies, 2000) develops along this
mode of representation. Its author, Andrea Caccia, is primarily a filmmaker,
but also a photographer and a screenwriter. He has authored both feature
and documentary films, experimenting with cinematic tools to generate an
unfamiliar apprehension of the work produced. Vedozero (Zerovision 2010),
for example, resulted from the editing of private videos shot on mobile
phones by young students attending a filmmaking workshop.
The story behind L’estate vola begins on July 29, 1999, when Yaguine
Koïta and Fodè Tounkara, two young boys from Guinea, decided to hide
in the cargo hold of a Sabena Airlines Airbus. They were trying to flee from
their home country to seek refuge in Europe. Predictably, they froze to death
before getting to Brussels airport, and their bodies were not found until
several days later, on August 2, after three or four return journeys had been
completed between Canakry and Brussels. One of the rescuers found a letter
to the European community hidden in a pocket; it was, of course, a plea for
asylum that described Europe as a civilized, rich, and enlightened place.
Like many stories of this kind, the narrative of Yaguine and Fodè’s death
circulated widely, and it renewed debates over the condition of migrants
and the moral responsibility to provide them with shelter. There was a lot of
106 The Relocation of Culture

“pseudo-solidarity,” to use Gilroy’s definition (Gilroy 2000, 6), but then life
went on, and the two boys were forgotten. In a joint interview with Arjun
Appadurai and Paul Gilroy, conducted in 1997, the close connection between
the removal of memory, the simplification of the West/rest relationship, and
the pervasive need to get back to “business as usual” were presented as very
strong obstacles to real understanding (Bell 1999, 22–3).
In his essay “Globalization and the Claim of Postcoloniality,” Simon
Gikandi retells the story of the Guinean boys in order to trigger a real critical
discussion about the extent to which the do-gooders and the intellectuals
in particular got involved in the issue of understanding the migrants even
before pretending to help them (Gikandi 2001, 630). They do not seem
to know the language and they cannot move beyond a formalized and
neutralized commemoration of the dead and compassion toward the living.
The point not directly raised by Gikandi, but certainly implied in his essay, is
that migration requires a brand-new language, suited to a tragically old and
recurring experience. What is needed is a kind of estrangement, the artistic
ability to literally move—“transducere”—a story that may easily become
another tragedy of migration to a different context, so as to translate the real
into a cognitively effective fiction.
L’estate vola was released by the Italian filmmaker Andrea Caccia in 2000;
hence it was shot soon after the death of the Guinean boys, which was recent
enough to be remembered but would soon, and predictably, fade away.
Caccia decided to devote a short film to their failed attempt at running away,
and though he wanted to document a real story—and his film is labeled
a documentary—he chose a rather unusual narrative path. In short, he
made a real, failed runaway into a science-fiction parable on the impossible
rescue of a castaway. Shot in Milan in August, in an almost deserted and
sweltering city, it was easy for the filmmaker to simulate a dystopian setting,
a wasted and desolate landscape, quite like the urban archetype introduced
by George Orwell in 1984. The leading character is never seen. He is an
alien who has come to Earth in search of his lost brother but he appears
only as the voice-over, narrating the story and explaining the setting. The
protagonist’s brother, it seems, was marooned on Planet Earth—believed to
be healthy and flourishing—when his shuttle was shipwrecked and he was
then lost in unfamiliar surroundings. The protagonist is looking for him
but is losing hope; he also has doubts about his ability to survive in this
dangerous environment.
Several technical features of the film reinforce this feeling of estrangement.
Caccia decided to shoot the film in Super 8, producing footage that is rough
and scratchy, deliberately unclear. The voice-over speaks French and is not
always fully understandable as it recounts the story of his slow death. For
 The Gaze of Medusa 107

most of the film, the viewer is fascinated but at the same time puzzled and
completely focused on the need to understand what is going on.
Not until the end of the film is the spectator given the key to the tale, in
white end titles on a black screen. That key is Yaguine and Fodè’s letter, their
naive and direct call for help alongside the persistent and well-established
perception of Europe as “a better place.” No commentary is provided, thus
avoiding any risk of imposing a Western interpretation onto the migrants’
words. The translation of the tragedy is in fact produced by the film itself and
by the author’s choice to imagine another kind of journey and to offer his
gaze as marked by the sort of “outsidedness” that Polezzi mentions (Polezzi
2012, 351). The ordinary understanding of the relationship between human
and other is reversed, and what we hear is the voice of an alien, describing
Earth as a totally unfamiliar place. Both the story and the setting are seen
“from the outside” and what you perceive as a human being watching the film
suddenly acquires a totally different meaning.
The narrative strategy is a highly sophisticated one, though the resulting
text produces a strong and direct impact. As a Westerner, Caccia must
“translate” the experience of forced migration into something he can
understand. He keeps some distance from the “real facts,” probing their
meaning and eventually “reproducing” them through the filter of his culture
and his talent. In so doing, he is in fact respecting the other, accepting the
impossibility of replicating the real, taking in the possibility of translating
the story into something different, something that is fictional but that retains
the testimonial function of this kind of text.
Fully aware that, as an intellectual, he must work as an interpreter, he does not
approach the story directly but takes a sidelong path that combines the urge to
recount a very real journey as well as a fictional story of two brothers, one looking
for the other in what is perceived as a totally alien landscape. The neutralizing
impact of the stereotype clashes with the creative choice of exploiting the literary
tradition of dystopia, which is revised and adapted to the narrative needs of this
specific tale. Thus, Caccia develops a mode of intervention that allows the shift
“from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding
of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through
stereotypical discourse” (Bhabha 2004, 95). Once this process of subjectification
moves to center stage, it becomes impossible not to see the ambiguity of the
stereotype and the mystery of the other, leading one to respect their otherness
while at the same time taking full responsibility for the representation.
The issue of responsibility is of paramount importance. Though
compassion may be the first reaction when facing representations of death
and violence, compassion is not what is called for, as Azoulay argues. What
is needed is the spectators’ full awareness that they have responsibilities as
108 The Relocation of Culture

citizens of the world (Azoulay 2008, 17). Because again, the act of seeing
affects what is being seen, but also the person who sees.

4.4 Their Own Gaze

“Translation,” Polezzi states, “is a consciously political act” (Polezzi 2012,

354). Borrowing from Michael Cronin, she emphasizes the relevance of
agency in the relationship between translation and migration (Polezzi 2012,
348). What Cronin defines as the “autonomous practice of translation”
(Cronin 2006, 45) gives the migrants the possibility to become “active
subjects” in translation—switching from the passive role of objects (of study,
representation, translation, etc.) to the ability to use their own voice to express
their own meanings. This practice stands in sharp contrast to the more usual
“heteronomous practices” that are based on the perception of the migrants as
unable to translate their own meanings and therefore needing a support that
may easily become a form of control (Polezzi 2012, 349). This critical frame
of reference is important to keep in mind when one is working on images
instead of words. The existing photographic and visual representations
of migration in the Mediterranean Sea are mostly the result of the gaze of
Westerners and respond to their cultural frame of mind. In practice, these
images give us an idea of their individual and collective understanding of
the issue of migration. The biopolitics of language also affects images. And
while the political nature of language is certainly not exclusive to migration
scenarios, migration enhances its visibility, highlighting the interplay of the
linguistic choices that are variously permitted, frowned upon, singled out for
praise, or simply barred (Polezzi 2012, 346).
The young photographer Kevin McElvaney is explicitly “political,” in the
sense Polezzi suggests (Polezzi 2012, 354), in his project #RefugeeCameras.9
Originating from the intention of providing the refugee seekers with a tool for
self-representation so as to allow them to portray themselves (on their own),
the project consisted in putting fifteen disposable cameras into the hands of a
group of migrants at Izmir, Lesvos, Athens, and Idomeni. The migrants, who
became friends with McElvaney, were each given a camera, together with
pre-addressed envelopes and enough money to send their work back to the
photographer. McElvaney received seven out of the fifteen cameras back, had

9
The project is fully available here: http://kevin-mcelvaney.com/portfolio/project-refugee
cameras/ (last accessed: January 22, 2018).
 The Gaze of Medusa 109

the photos printed and published them on his website.10 The photos sent back
by Zakaria (Syria—Camera # 1) portray the migrants in the middle of the sea,
on board an overcrowded rubber dinghy. The precarious space is represented
in meaningful fragments: the small outboard engine, the migrants sitting on
the tubes, dressed to keep out the cold, the close-up of a migrant on the left
side of the photo, while at his back a rescue boat is approaching, the clustered
heads of women and children, another close-up of a boy hugging a child,
both of them almost smiling. All the pictures are in black and white and all of
them include the boat and the sea. Finally, all of them are pervaded by a sense
of being suspended, the feeling of inhabiting an ambiguous space, one that
has been sought out by people in search of salvation but that may suddenly
become a site of death.
As a photographer and a European artist, McElvaney makes a tough choice.
He could have taken the pictures himself to provide his own representation of
the same journey. The photos would have been more professional, probably
more effective from an artistic point of view, except that such an artistic result
was not the point of the project. In a culture already saturated with images
of migration, McElvaney’s project creates the conditions for the migrants to
make themselves visible and succeeds in providing an original point of view,
a highly individual recapitulation of a journey often generically described
and domesticated by the Western media. The gaze informing the pictures—
unusual in their roughness and lack of professional skill—is steeped in
experience and cultures that would be difficult to imitate or to translate into
our Western epistemology.
In presenting the project on his website, McElvaney effectively sums up
the Western way of stealing stories that are not ours:

We always decide what is important to say and what is not

We always photograph the refugees in their situations
We are those who tell stories
We.

So this is another way, a possible path toward a kind of representation that

resists the understanding of images as a physiological process: the observers
are not given the photographer’s interpretations of somebody else’s experience.
They watch through the eyes of the migrants after having handed over the tools
and stepped aside. Just like words, images do not have an immutable essence.
They are translated into a definite cultural frame, normally located in space

10
The photographs were first exhibited in Milan, during the XXI edition of the Milan Film
Festival, in 2015.
110 The Relocation of Culture

and time, which results from situated knowledge. They are historicized, and
their historicity—the vital link between their visible shape and the sense to
which this visible shape alludes—is never stated in terms of linear reciprocity
but implies a host of factors mediating between facts and opinions, between
the real and the knowledge of the real. To conclude, then, with the words
with which we opened our reflection in this chapter, migrants do not dodge
translation; rather, “they keep being translated” (Walkowitz 2015, 31).
 5

Melting Wor(l)ds

A fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there.
—Ali Smith, Autumn, 2016

5.1 Translation on the Border/Translation as Bordering

In Book Two of Il cortegiano (1528), Baldesar Castiglione tells the story

of an Italian merchant who goes to Poland to meet some Russian traders
and buy sable. Russia and Poland are at war, so the two groups meet and
stand on the opposite banks of the Diepr; nobody dares to cross the border
by walking on the frozen surface of the river. The Italian merchant and his
crew, therefore, start bellowing their questions about the fur’s price, but it
is so cold that the Russians’ answers freeze in midair before reaching the
other bank. Thus, the merchant decides to light a fire in order to thaw
the Russian merchants’ words so that he can hear them. But by the time the
fire starts burning, the Italian crew realizes that the Russians have left and
that doing business with them is no longer possible (Rebecchini 2016, 257).
This brief story metaphorically draws attention to two relevant issues of
this book. The first, and more explicit one, pertains to the semiotic aspect
of translation: you always need a way to make sense of a foreign tongue if
you want to create the material conditions for dialogue. The second relates
to the topographical meaning of translation, which evokes a movement in
space: the story highlights the notion that translation requires the crossing
of a border, a process that is as much physical and spatial as it is symbolic
and epistemological. When borders are redrawn, as is happening politically
today on a world scale, the impact that the operation has on the translation of
people from one place to another is enormous and irreversible.
Stuart Hall once wrote that “migration is a one-way trip. There’s no ‘home’
to go back to” (Hall 1987, 44). The practical implications of this statement
have never been clearer than today in the Mediterranean Sea. Rejected upon
reaching the southern borders of Italy and Greece or sent back to the Libyan
“concentration camps” they have just left behind, migrants cannot return
112 The Relocation of Culture

where they came from and they are prevented from moving forward. Their
translation fails, yet their relocation remains a political and humane necessity
(Di Maio 2013, 41–50). We see something similar in the endless debate on
the need to protect the US border from immigration from the South. A
real wall between the United States and Mexico can never be completed,
of course, due to the geographical features of the borderland: stretching
from the Pacific Ocean to the tip of southern Texas, the US border with
Mexico is 1,933 miles long, of which only about 700 currently have fencing
in place (Almond 2019). Yet the symbolic and cultural border between the
two countries has never appeared more insurmountable. As Dennis Wood
writes in a book on the power of maps, “The map doesn’t let us see anything,
but it does let us know what others have seen, found out, or discovered”
(Wood 1992, 6–7). And it is precisely the space between the reality we
live and the maps through which we process it that has defined the scope
of this book.
In the movement between “real world” and “symbolic universe,” borders
must be seen as something more than “imaginary lines on paper”—as the
sheik Rahman says in that short, intense reflection on history, colonialism,
war, and the drawing of maps that is Hutchinson’s play Durand’s Line
(Hutchinson 2009, 33–6). Borders fully belong to the universe of signs: they
are both topography and metaphor. Any attempt at separating one aspect
from the other is impossible. They are the two sides of the same coin: they
need difference to exist. This relation is made performative through the
act of moving from one place (meaning the act of abandoning a whole
Weltanschauung to enter another) to a different one (meaning that one must
begin to frame one’s own way of life within a distinct symbolic universe) via
the crossing of a borderline, whether it be natural or political. The boundaries
between one place and another, therefore, also perform as symbolic
thresholds. They represent the place where, electively, the phenomenon of
translation is fully realized as a multifaceted process that involves a number
of variables, among which language is the most visible.
The border is the place where migrants—that is human beings—are
translated into something different: over the centuries, they have been
transformed into goods, infrahuman entities, laborers, reproductive
machines, domestic workers and caregivers, etc. They may—like the foreign
words in Il Cortegiano—freeze in mid-journey and be therefore obliged to
renounce their right to relocation—in translation—into a new social and
cultural context. In other words, they do not make sense, yet they exist
and demand attention. What we have tried to do in our work is unearth
the complexities, obstacles, challenges, and difficulties that occur when
relocation is not completed or successful, when the entities to be translated—
 Melting Wor(l)ds 113

both linguistically, culturally, socially, politically, ethically—are frozen in

midair and are stuck in the middle of a sea or denied access or meaning.
Our primary references are to two contexts—the North and Central
American one, in Chapters 1 and 2 and the European and Mediterranean
one in Chapters 3 and 4. While showing the contiguities and similarities
between these two different sets of conditions, they also reveal the theory
of translation that we have sketched out in this book, i.e., the creation of
schemas of understanding that, rather than project an image of the world
as we might want it, are derived from those experiences of the world that
exceed our inherited conceptual frameworks. History can come to our aid in
this time of crisis. In the Mediterranean Sea in particular, what is unfolding
today reveals numerous analogies with what was happening, say, in Ancient
Greece. Homer told stories of border-crossings, showing quite clearly, and
in the same way as many other narrators, how the boundary enclosing a
community can be the locus of necessary change, the end of the world-as-
we-know-it, and the beginning of a different culture and temporality. When
crossing it, you may or may not translate yourself into this different culture,
and if you don’t, this choice turns you into a foreigner and an outlaw. In other
words, translation is posited as a good way to live.
A quick survey of the newsfeeds surrounding migration in the
Mediterranean today, however, conveys a very different image as the
collective point of view is identified not with the traveler but with the enclosed
community—Fortress Europe being the overarching metaphor—which is
being invaded by migrants “assailing” its weak underbelly. Similarly, in North
America, the headlines covering migration quintessentially follow the same
conceptual dyad: legality as domestic, illegality as foreign. In fact, so much
of the media and political attention is directed to the southern border: from
issues of national security to deportations; from struggles against illegal
migration to resistance against the abuse of migrants’ rights; from an electoral
promise to the construction, maintenance, and policing of a border wall
between the United States and Mexico as an incandescent metaphor of the
new order of things.
The quotation from Ali Smith’s “Brexit” novel, Autumn, which was
used as an epigraph to this chapter, captures the tenor of the current global
political discourse surrounding migration—and which directly relates to
the pedagogical project sustaining this book—i.e., the need for a firm line
of division between us and them, one nation, culture, language, and another.
But what if the terms we have been using to talk about culture, identity,
and community are conceptually wrong or simply out of date? How would
our vision of the current state of affairs change? This is the heart of the
matter, and this is what each of the chapters of this book has attempted to
114 The Relocation of Culture

do: offer a limited but representative showcase of how we can understand

language, culture, identity from the standpoint of the border, of translation,
of migration. In other words, instead of positing the border, translation,
migration as exceptions to the norm, they are seen as, materially as well as
symbolically, the normal way of being in this world, the very center of things.
According to Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, there has not yet been a
real change in the “experience of the Other” as philosophers and scholars
“never really put a foot outside the metaphysical ground nor elucidate the
identity of otherness. In the best of cases, they simultaneously expand the
empire of logocentrism (which becomes able to rule from the margins)
and accentuate the feeling of indeterminacy (which renders the margins
even more unreachable) simultaneously” (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 85).
For these reasons, translation and relocation are twin processes and both
necessary, particularly when vulnerable subjects are involved, because the
act of abandoning one’s own homeland makes the dislocated individual
unsheltered and trapped in-between two worlds (Farrier 2011, 57–90), in a
position where they tend to become invisible, victimized, or criminalized by
norms that actively impair their relocation.
The artists and the scholars quoted in our work have trained our gaze, our
hearing, and our taste so that we can see this invisibility. Like the citizens of
the twin cities of Beszel and UlQoma in the dystopian world created by China
Miéville (2009), we are taught—both in the United States and in Europe—
how to counteract the practice of “unseeing” toward the migrants, a practice
that is not openly imposed by law, as in Miéville’s novel, but in practice works
the same way. We progressively train ourselves to ignore the very presence
of the migrants moving in our cities and working for us, thus producing a
sort of imaginary topography, another city, where we are not invaded by
threatening strangers. What we believe is that this process—mesmerizing as
it is in Miéville’s novel—becomes dangerous and must be reversed so as to
support the possibility of an epistemological relocation, which is necessary
before any political or cultural change can take place.
Thus, the real issue, for us as educators, is to find ways to understand
relocation and articulate it without eluding or eliding its social, cultural,
political, and ethical implications. Here the seminal work of Homi Bhabha
has been the foundation of our analysis. Rereading them today, the opening
words of The Location of Culture, sound prophetic to say the least: “It
is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of
the beyond” (Bhabha 2004, 1). In encouraging theories to put aside any
“narrative of originary and initial subjectivities” (Bhabha 2004), Bhabha in
fact anticipated the changes to come more or less forty years later, when his
attempt at reframing cultures has been necessarily transformed—historically,
culturally, and politically—into a process of endless relocation, which de
 Melting Wor(l)ds 115

facto becomes a process of endless translation (Sakai and Solomon 2006, 36).
Jacir’s installation Via Crucis analyzed in Chapter 1 and Mario Badagliacca’s
photographic work discussed in Chapter 4 effectively and poetically
highlight the ways in which travel and translation coalesce in a multiple
border-crossing that is at the same time a movement through space and time,
from ancient world to the current tragedy taking place in the Mediterranean
Sea. Secular relics of places and communities are reshuffled in a relocation
of different traditions, and, as Vicente Rafael states, “What emerges in the
aporias of translation is a kind of semantic bouleversement, the sense of
upheaval whereby the endlessly enfolded meanings of particular events will
always make any discourse feel unfinished and incomplete” (Rafael 2016,
18). Borders, then, become devices and may be used in different ways. In
this book, we have focused our attention on borders as sites of meaning:
ontological, epistemological, and cultural.

5.2 Translation as the Relocation of Culture

The “translation zone” has become the key location of planetary

postmodernity, writes Emily Apter in her eponymous book (Apter 2006):
around the world many people and communities lead polyglot lives, and
their sense of identity, history, ethnicity, and even nationality is as entangled
as their way of translating between the various lects of their existence.
In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson make use of
Apter’s definition of translation zone to “question the usually harmonious
resonances of the term cultural translation” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013,
272). Following their lead, our work has aimed to develop an analysis of the
dialogic relationship between languages and cultures in the context of the
relocation of people.
Migration directly contributes to shaping the composition of our society
and its global labor force so much so that the description of translation zones
as exceptions no longer holds. In a way that is analogous to our approach,
Mezzadra and Neilson explore the semantic network of the border in the
creation of globalized labor forces and detail how translation is being used, in
several parts of the world, to create dynamics of inclusion or exclusion, to create
hierarchies and division of labor, or else to build bridges through cooperation
and forms of activism. Two of the examples they provide capture the vibrant
continuum of experiences that the translation-migration dyad embodies: the
taxi drivers’ strikes in New York City that led to the Fare Raise victory in 2004
and that were made possible by grassroots activism and a lot of translation
among the cab drivers themselves who are often over-educated polyglots in
116 The Relocation of Culture

transit toward better job opportunities. And, at the other end of the spectrum,
the case of labor migration from India to the Gulf area where companies are
mindful to draw workers from a variety of regions as linguistic, national,
and cultural and ethnic differences help build a docile workforce—less able
to organize and strike (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 15–25). The principle,
of course, is not new and was actualized on board the slave ships and on the
plantations during the slave trade, creating a cacophony of words and meanings
that has been brilliantly captured, visually as well as aurally, by NourbeSe Philip
in her powerful performances of her Zong! poems (Figure 5.1).1
“Relocation,” in its European usage within contemporary migration
discourse, indicates the “redistribution of migrants” (Figure 5.2) who have
landed on the coasts of Greece and Italy across the territories of all the EU
member states, which is at the moment a highly contested political issue.
In fact, by entitling this book The Relocation of Culture, we explicitly chose
to contextualize our work within the current migration phenomenon. If
translation is a “relocation,” however temporary, of people, meanings, and ideas,
then where does that relocation happen? The border, we maintain, is the space
where translation exists and where, therefore, it should be studied. As Sakai
writes, translation “is not only a border crossing but also and preliminarily an
act of drawing a border, of bordering” (Sakai 2010, 32). Thus, our method has
intentionally brought together translation and migration through a close reading
of a diverse range of artifacts, all translingual, transnational, and translational.
In approaching texts as diverse as, on the European side, Chris Cleave’s novel
The Other Hand—portraying a young Nigerian’s search for asylum during the
oil wars—and, on the American side, Valeria Luiselli’s testimonial text Tell Me
How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, we have had to develop a context-
specific approach to notions of displacement, migration, and relocation, while
simultaneously identifying points of contiguity and similarity in the service
of our theory of translation as migration. The young Nigerian girl fleeing
her country to look for a new belonging and the children interviewed and
translated by Luiselli share a similar migration and translation experience,
though the first one is fictional. They have to relocate themselves to a new
culture that was portrayed as familiar and welcoming but in fact was not. They
have to deal with the language of international and immigration law, which
translates their lives into cases to be won, at least in Luiselli’s book.

1
Zong! is an experimental book by the Tobago-born poet M. N. Philip. Published in
2008, the poem has acquired a new visibility in recent years, thanks to the powerful
performances by the artist who recreates at the site of the performance the resounding
environment of the slave ship by having the audience read and perform, simultaneously,
short lines from the poem. A video of one of her performances is available here: https://
youtu.be/oHKaWprNCGM
Figure 5.1 M. N. Philip’s Zong!, 2008, 80–1.
118 The Relocation of Culture

Figure 5.2 From Il Corriere della Sera, June 30, 2017.

Closer to the children’s experiences investigated by Luiselli is a 2018 short

film by Ed Perkins, which was a 2019 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary
(Short Subject).2 In Black Sheep, the border that is crossed is European,

2
The film is available here: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2018/11/03/black-sheep/
(Last accessed: 10 February 2021)
 Melting Wor(l)ds 119

intranational rather than international, and both psychological and physical.

Inspired by a true story, the film is a long monologue spoken by Cornelius
Walker who remembers when, soon after the murder of the ten-year-old
Damilola Taylor in his neighborhood, he moved from Peckham (London) to
Essex, with his family, into a totally white environment. Experiencing racism
for the first time in his life, the young boy—just like Little Bee in Chris Cleave’s
novel—tried to fit in. After his first fight at school—a fight during which, as
he says, he simply “froze” waiting for the beating to be finished—he started
a process of translating himself into something similar to the white boys he
wanted to be friends with. The “signs” of translation are simple: first clothing,
then hair, then accent, eyes (made blue by contact lenses), and skin (bleached).
At a certain point, he simply says: “It’s not even like I wanted to be white,
I just wanted to fit in” (Perkins 2018, 16:49). The issue of sharing the same
language—as a code of signs—is of paramount importance and, for both Little
Bee and Cornelius, it responds to the need to no longer be seen as a threat.
Language is central and so is translation. Our leading questions therefore
have been: to what extent can we analyze texts as diverse as a Mexican
American testimonial and a British novel in light of a migration-focused notion
of translation? Can the expansive notion of translation articulated in this book
generate new terms in the discourse on migrant identities in Europe and in the
United States? And how are they changing the Western perception of otherness
and its translation into manageable terms? Our fully developed answers to these
questions are in the preceding chapters, but in short, our answer is affirmative,
for we are convinced that a radical perspectival shift is available if we adopt
translation as a lens for reading contemporary texts about migration.
As readers and scholars, we might not be able to identify with the
protagonists of current stories of migration and, for many reasons having to
do with the type of privileged lives that we lead, we should not, but we can
read, learn, and allow these stories to challenge our view of the world, or the
canons of our disciplines, or the definition of home and land, or even the
meaning of common words such as ice. In Tell Me How It Ends, for instance,
Luiselli talks about the meaning of la hielera (the icebox) in the context of
pan-American migrations, which highlights the secondary connotations that
the word “ice” has assumed in American English:
The ice-box derives its name from the fact that the children in it are
under ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) custody. The name
also points to the fact that the detention centers along the border are a
kind of enormous refrigerator for people, constantly blasted with gelid
air as if to ensure that the foreign meat does not go bad too quickly—
120 The Relocation of Culture

naturally, it must be harboring all sorts of deadly germs. The children are
treated more like carriers of diseases than children.
(Luiselli 2017, 22)

The children are like the frozen words of the Russian merchants in
Castiglione’s story, and translation on the border affords us the means to hear
them while also making it impossible for us to ignore them. And this leads to
our final point about our responsibility—both as an ability to respond and as
an ethical response—as readers, critics, and intellectuals.

5.3 Translation Literacy and Global Citizenship

To conclude, we would like to spend a few words on the pedagogical vision
that this book articulates. It builds on our interest in and previous research
on translation (Bertacco) and migration (Vallorani), respectively, as well as
our general discomfort with the distance between our academic fields and
the social issues surrounding us. The first idea for the book was generated in
Milan in June 2016, just a few days after the Brexit Referendum that declared
the UK’s intention to exit the European Union. It was such a watershed
moment, whose social, financial, cultural consequences are being worked out
as we write, which led us to think about a collaborative project that would be
markedly different from our previous ones, a project that would reproduce
the open dialogue between two scholars and two educators. The pedagogical
model we had in mind was that of team-teaching: two authors bringing
two approaches to the same project and two different ways of reading the
phenomena of translation and migration—and their intersection. If this
inevitably implies a less seamless finished product, it also constitutes a
valuable instrument in the hands of readers who are invited by the structure
of the book to join in the conversation with their own interpretations and
case studies, notice the small inconsistencies and differences as points of
discussion and negotiation, and form their own opinions on the topics under
discussion. What we wanted to suggest was a different theoretical approach
to translation, with reference to the issue of migration today, and to do so
through an analysis of different kinds of representations (literary texts, films,
documentaries, photographic and visual arts projects, performance art,
documentary writing, etc.), breaking the commonly held divide between art
and politics that relegates the humanities to an ancillary role when it comes
to understanding the problems of the “real” world.
And so we turn, once again, to Homi Bhabha and his recent interventions
in which he makes a passionate case for the usefulness of the humanities
in understanding the cultural and political “lifeworlds” of our times:
 Melting Wor(l)ds 121

“[H]umanistic disciplines articulate the changing relationships between

cultural meaning and social value as they shape civic ‘agents’ who participate
in the creation of public opinion and the definition of public interest” (Bhabha
2018, 7). While it goes without saying that the relationships between cultural
meanings and social values change according to place, time, politics, etc., the
same does not seem to apply to our educational methods, our intellectual
categories, or our disciplines. A case in point, as we saw in the previous
chapters, is the shared view of language, culture, and translation that still
circulates in most Western educational models.
In this book we argued for the practical value of a humanities education
and for the humanities classroom as a place in which education for global
citizenship can actually happen. Doris Sommer puts it in bolder terms when
she writes, “[T]his is the kind of technical training for democracy that we
can do in the fields of language arts and that cannot be done elsewhere”
(Sommer 2004, 137). A truly global education starts, as Adrienne Rich wrote,
from an act of locating ourselves on the world map: seeing translation as a
vital principle of our cultural life, in some cases as the only way to exist in
that world, acknowledging the plurality of language worlds, making room
for the asymmetries between these worlds, and pausing over the points
of disconnect they produce. “Whether more than one culture is inside or
alongside the subject,” Sommer writes, “the doubling or multiplying of
codes amounts to a humbling consciousness of one’s own limits” (Sommer
2004, 134). This, in our view, is the most urgent call to action for humanists
today and the area that translation opens forcefully for our consideration.
For our world to develop more complex, nonbinary relationships with the
unfamiliar—whatever this may be—what is needed is a translation literacy
that makes translation visible on every possible occasion. As experiences of
incomprehension in front of aspects of global culture are “the new normal”
in our daily lives, they should also be “the new normal” in the classroom.
If we consider migration through the lens of translation, the responsibility for
and to the other that translation entails is foregrounded not as something that is
intentionally embraced; rather, as something that constitutes the precondition
of all translative acts and defines us as agents of translation at either end of the
spectrum. Within a translative framework, in fact, a person, a text, a cultural
or political event does not just speak; it speaks to me in a particular way and
may ask that I set aside or reexamine my received ideas or preconceptions
(Blumczynski 2016, 59–61). In other words, translation establishes a call-
and-response relationship between its actors and we find ourselves—always
and already—responsible for the other. “Without responsibility for the other,”
Derek Attridge—borrowing from Levinas—writes, “there is no other” (Attridge
2004, 127). Nothing perhaps more than this single point makes translation
the ideal partner concept to migration within the current cultural debate.
 References

Foreword
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Einland
and Kevin McLaughlin. Prepared on the basis of the German volume edited
by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Luiselli, Valeria. 2019. Lost Children Archive. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Rendall, Steven. 1997. “The Translator’s Task,” Walter Benjamin (Translation).
TTR 10 (2): 151–65.
Zohn, Harry. (1968) 2007. “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin
(Translation). In Illuminations, edited and with an introduction by Hannah
Arendt, Preface by Leon Wieseltier, 69–82. New York: Schocken Books.

Acknowledgments
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Introduction
Akbar, Arifa. 2013. “John William’s Stoner Enjoys Renaissance.” The
Independent, June 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/
books/features/john-williams-stoner-enjoys-renaissance-8642782.html
Apter, Emily 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2008. “Untranslatables: A New World System.” New Literary
History 39: 581–98.
Apter, Emily 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability.
London and New York: Verso.
Apter, Emily, 2016. “An Interview with Emily Apter.” Interview by Simona
Bertacco. The New Centennial Review. Translation and the Global Humanities
16 (1): 9–27.
Arduini, Stefano, and Siri Nergaard. 2011. “Translation: A New Paradigm.”
Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal 1 (inaugural issue): 8–17.
 References 123

Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York and
Cambridge: Zone Books, distributed by the MIT Press.
Baer, Brian James. 2020. “From Cultural Translation to Untranslatability:
Theorizing Translation outside Translation Studies.” Alif 40: 139–63.
Barnes, Julian. 2013. “Stoner: The Must-Read Novel of 2013.” The Guardian,
December 13. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-
john-williams-julian-barnes
Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi, eds. 1999. Post-Colonial Translation: Theory
and Practice. Translation Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited and
with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, preface by Leon Wieseltier. New
York: Schocken Books.
Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series Directed
by Michael Dibb. Reissued as part of the Penguin Design Series. Penguin on
Design. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.
Berman, Sandra. 2005. “Introduction.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of
Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Woods, 1–10. Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Betts, Raymond. 2009. Decolonization. London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by
the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Lives. The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London: Verso.
Carrington, Ben. 2001. “Decentering the Centre: Cultural Studies in Britain
and Its Legacy.” In A Companion to Cultural Studies, edited by Toby Miller,
275–97. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell.
Costanzo, Saverio. 2018. L’amica geniale/My Brilliant Friend. TV Series. Italy/USA.
Cronin, Michael. 2003. Translation and Globalization. London and New York:
Routledge.
Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New York:
Routledge.
Curti, Lidia. 1992. “What Is Real and What Is Not. Female Fabulation in
Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Paula
A. Treichler, and Cary Nelson, 134–53. London and New York: Routledge.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Di Maio, Alessandra. 2012. “Mediterraneo Nero. Le Rotte Migranti Nel
Millennio Globale.” In La Città Cosmopolita. Altre Narrazioni, edited by
Giulia De Spuches, 143–63. Palermo: G.B. Palumbo Editore.
Di Maio, Alessandra. 2013. “The Mediterranean or Where Africa Does (Not)
Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud di Lampedusa (2006).” In The Cinemas of
Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, edited by Sabine
Schrader and Daniel Winkler, 41–52. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
Durzi, Giacomo. 2017. Ferrante Fever. Film. Italy.
124 References

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated from the French by
Charles Lam Markmann New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated from the French by
Richard Philcox. Foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah. New York: Grove
Press.
Farrier, David. 2011. Post-Colonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Ferrante, Elena. 2012. L’amica geniale. Rome: Edizioni e/o. 2012 (My Brilliant
Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions).
Gentzler, Edwin. 2011. “Translation: A New Paradigm.” Translation (1): 8–17.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2017. Translation and Re-Writing in the Age of Post-Translation
Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Gikandi, Simon. 2001. “Globalization and the Claim of Postcoloniality.” The
South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3): 627–58.
Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. The Wellek Lectures. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2010. Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic
Culture. The W.E.B. DuBois Lectures. Cambridge and London: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2014a. “Offshore Humanism: Human Rights and Hydrarchy.”
https://tomtrevor.net/2014/04/06/paul-gilroy-offshore-humanism-human-
rights-and-hydrarchy/
Gilroy, Paul. 2014b. “Lecture I. Suffering and Infrahumanity.” In Tanner Lectures
on Human Values, Yale (USA): Yale University. http://tannerlectures.utah.
edu/Gilroy%20manuscript%20PDF.pdf
Hall, Stuart. 1987. “Minimal Selves.” In The Real Me: Post-Modernism and the
Question of Identity. ICA, Document 6. 44–6. London: The Institute of
Contemporary Arts.
Hall, Stuart. 1992. “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” In Cultural
Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Paula A. Treichler, and Cary Nelson,
277–94. London and New York: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds. 1997. Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices. Culture, Media, and Identities.
London: Sage/The Open University.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics, and Language.
London and New York: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. London and New York:
Routledge.
Kreider, Tim. 2013. “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard Of.” The
New Yorker, October 20. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
the-greatest-american-novel-youve-never-heard-of
 References 125

Lotman, Jurij Mihajlovič, and Boris Andreevič Uspenskij. (1971) 2001. Tipologia
della cultura. Edited by Remo Faccani and Marzio Marzaduri, translated into
Italian by Manila Barbato Faccani et al. Milan: Bompiani.
Lyotard, Jean-François. (1979) 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Culture, 1st edition. Translation from the French by Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Maitland, Sarah. 2017. What Is Cultural Translation? London, Oxford, New
York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury. (e-book)
Malkin, Irad. 1998. The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mezzadra, Sandro. 2008. La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente
globale. Verona: Ombre corte.
Mezzadra, Sandro. 2010. “Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory
of the Multitude.” In The Politics of Culture. Around the Work of Naoki Sakai,
edited by Richard Calichman and John Naimjun Kim, 121–37. London and
New York: Routledge.
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the
Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Colonialities, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Philcox, Richard. 2006. “Frantz Fanon: Retrieving a Lost Voice: A Conversation
between Celia Britton and Richard Philcox on the Latest Translation
of Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).”
Translation Review (71): 3–7.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 2016 “Lessons for Losing.” The New Centennial Review.
Translation and the Global Humanities 16 (1): 245–51.
Rich, Adrienne. (1984) 1986. “Notes towards a Politics of Location.” In Blood,
Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. 1st edition, 210–31. New York
and London: Norton.
Rubio, Doris McGartland. et al. 2010. “Defining Translational Research:
Implications for Training.” Academic Medicine 85 (3): 470–5.
Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991.
London: Granta.
Said, Edward W. 1984. “Reflections on Exile.” Granta 12 (Winter): 137–49.
Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon, eds. 2006. Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial
Difference. Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2018. The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of
Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sentilles, Sarah. 2017. Draw Your Weapons. New York: Random House.
Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of
Transmission. London and New York: Routledge.
126 References

Sofo, Giuseppe. “Circulant Humanities: Humanity’s in Movement.” In Travelling

Europe: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Place and Space, edited by Gail
Mobley et al., 98–105. Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015.
Sofo, Giuseppe, and Giuliano Rossi. 2015. Sulla traduzione: itinerari fra lingue,
letterature e culture. Chieti: Solfanelli.
Soyinka, Wole et al. 2016. Migrations/Migrazioni: An Afro-Italian Night of the
Poets/La notte dei poeti afro-italiani. Edited by Alessandra Di Maio. Rome:
66thand2nd.
Starosta, Anita. 2013. “Accented Criticism: Translation and Global Humanities.”
Boundary 2 40 (3): 163–80.
Tymoczco, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. Translation and Power.
Amherst: University of Massachussets Press.
UN Migration. 2019. World Migration Report 2020. Geneva: International
Organization for Migration.
Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.
London and New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice.
London and New York: Routledge.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age
of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Williams, John. (1965) 2006. Stoner. New York: New York Review of Books.
Wood, James. 2013. “Women on the Verge: The fiction of Elena Ferrante.” The
New Yorker, January 13. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/
women-on-the-verge

Chapter 1
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated
by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability.
London and New York: Verso.
Bellos, David. 2011. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of
Everything. London: Faber and Faber.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by
the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi. 2018. “Migration, Rights, and Survival: The Importance of the
Humanities Today.” From the European South 3: 7–12.
Bhabha, Homi. 2019. Keynote Lecture. Northeast Modern Language
Association, Washington, DC, March 22.
 References 127

Chambers, Ross. 2004. Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and

the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chaudhuri, Sukanta. 1999. Translation and Understanding. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Di Maio, Alessandra. 2012. “Mediterraneo Nero. Le rotte migranti nel millennio
globale.” In La città cosmopolita. Altre narrazioni, edited by Giulia De
Spuches, 143–63. Palermo: G.B. Palumbo Editore.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2011. “Translation: A New Paradigm.” Translation (1): 8–17.
Gentzler, Edwin. 2017. Translation and Re-Writing in the Age of Post-Translation
Studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Godard, Barbara. 2003. “Translation Poetics: From Modernity to Post-
Modernity.” In Translation Translation, edited by Susan Petrilli, 87–99.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Hedge, Radha S. 2016. Mediating Migration. Cambridge: Polity.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics, and Language.
London and New York: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. London and New York:
Routledge.
Jacir, Emily. 2011. “Social Space-If-Absence/Presence/Censorship.” The
Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/
absencepresencecensorship
Jacir, Emily, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt. 2016. Translatio.
Rome: Produzioni Nero.
Kant, Immanuel. (1795) 1957. Perpetual Peace. Edited by Lewis White Beck,
New York: Bobs Merrill.
Lansdowne, John. 2016. “The Truth in Material Things.” In Translatio, edited
by Emily Jacir, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt, 4–16. Rome:
Produzioni Nero.
de León, Conceptión. 2019. “Valeria Luiselli, at Home in Two Worlds.” New
York Times, February 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/valeria-
luiselli-lost-children-archive.html
Levinson, Hilary Ann. 2015. “Disturbing Translations: Distance, Memory, and
Representation in Contemporary Latin American Literature.” PhD diss.,
University of Michigan.
Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.
Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
MacEvitt, Christopher. 2016. “Fragments of a Landscape.” In Translatio, edited
by Emily Jacir, John Lansdowne, and Christopher MacEvitt, 106–12. Rome:
Produzioni Nero.
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the
Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, Walter. 2012. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures,
Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. “Translation and Migration.” Translation Studies 5 (3):
345–68.
128 References

Rafael, Vicente. 2005. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the
Techniques of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Rafael, Vicente. L. 2009. “Translation, American English, and the National
Insecurities of Empire.” Social Text 27 (4): 1–23.
Rafael, Vicente. L. 2016. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid
Wars of Translation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf
Press.
Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981–1991.
London: Granta.
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.
Sakai, Naoki. 2009a. “Dislocation in Translation.” TTR 221: 167–87.
Sakai, Naoki. 2009b. “How Do We Count a Language? Translation and
Discontinuity.” Translation Studies 2 (1): 71–88.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against
Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm.
Sentilles, Sarah. 2017. Draw Your Weapons. New York: Random House.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Trivedi, Harish. 2006. “In Our Own Time, in Our Own Words: ‘Translation’
in India.” In Translating Others, Vol. 1, edited by Theo Hermans, 102–19.
Manchester: St. Jerome.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population
Division 2017. International Migration Report 2017: Highlights (ST/ESA/
SER.A/404). https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/
migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/MigrationReport2017_
Highlights.pdf
Vallorani, Nicoletta. 2017. Nessun Kurtz. Cuore di tenebra e le parole
dell’occidente. DeGenere. Milan: Mimesis.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice.
London and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 2
Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-
Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1989) 2005. The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Criticism. London and New York:
Routledge.
Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York:
Routledge.
 References 129

Beattie, Pamela, and Simona Bertacco. 2018. “Philoctete’s Healing: Echoes of

Dante’s Purgatorio in Walcott’s Omeros.” Altre Modernità (18): 84–105.
Bertacco, Simona. 2009. “Postcolonialism.” In The Oxford Handbook of
Philosophy and Literature. edited by Richard Eldridge, 322–46. London:
Oxford University Press.
Bertacco, Simona. 2014. “The ‘Gift’ of Translation to Postcolonial Literatures.” In
Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures: Multilingual Contexts,
Translational Texts, edited by Simona Bertacco, 66–82. London and New
York: Routledge.
Bertacco, Simona. 2016. “On Translation: Between Postcolonialism and the
Global Humanities.” The New Centennial Review 16 (1): 177–94.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by
the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge.
Bickerton, Derek. 1973. “On the Nature of a Creole Continuum.” Language 49
(3): 640–69.
Brand, Dionne. 1990. No Language Is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press.
Brand, Dionne. 1997. Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Brathwaite, Kamau. (1979) 1993. “History and the Voice.” In Roots: Essays in
Caribbean Literature, edited by Kamau Brathwaite, 259–304. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Breiner, Laurence A. 2005. “Creole Language in the Poetry of Derek Walcott.”
Callaloo 28 (1): 29–41.
Casas, Maria C. 2009. Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing:
Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen and Brand.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Chamberlin, Edward J. 1993. Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the
West Indies. Toronto: MacClelland and Stewart.
Chaudhuri, Sukanta. 1999. Translation and Understanding. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming. 2004. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Cimarosti, Roberta. 2014. “Learning to Shant Well and the Art of the Good
Translator.” In Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures:
Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts, edited by Simona Bertacco, 48–65.
London and New York: Routledge.
Cumber Dance, Daryl. 2008. “‘Grung Tell Me Wud’: An Introduction to Karl.” In
Karl, edited by Velma Pollard, 9–20. London: Mango Publishing.
D’Costa, Jean. 2014. “The Caribbean Novelist and Language: A Search for a
Literary Medium.” In Caribbean Literary Discourse. Voice and Cultural
Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean, edited by Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa,
Velma Pollard, 68–92. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Dabydeen, David. 2011. Pak’s Britannica: Articles by and Interviews with David
Dabydee, edited by Lynne Macedo. Mona: University of the West Indies
Press.
130 References

DeCamp, David. 1971. “Towards a Generative Analysis of a Post-Creole Speech

Continuum.” In Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, edited by Dell
Hymes, 349–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edwards, Viv. 2004. Multilingualism in the English-Speaking World: Pedigree of
Nations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Genette, Gerard. (1972) 1980. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method.
Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Glissant, Édouard. (1990) 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Glissant, Edouard. 1976. “Free and Forced Poetics.” Alcheringa 2 (2): 95–101.
Grutman, Rainier. 2006. “Refraction and Recognition: Literary Multilingualism
in Translation.” Target 18 (1): 17–47.
Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London
and New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third World Literature in the Era of Capitalism.” Social
Text 15: 65–88.
Lalla, Barbara. 2014a. “Black Wholes: Phases in the Development of Jamaican
Literary Discourse.” In Caribbean Literary Discourse. Voice and Cultural
Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean, edited by Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa,
and Velma Pollard, 42–67. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Lalla, Barbara. 2014b. “Creole and Respec’: Authority and Identity in the
Development of Caribbean Literary Discourse.” In Caribbean Literary
Discourse. Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean, edited
by Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard, 101–10. Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press.
Lalla, Barbara, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard. 2014. “Introduction.” In
Caribbean Literary Discourse. Voice and Cultural Identity in the Anglophone
Caribbean, edited by Barbara Lalla, Jean D’Costa, and Velma Pollard, 1–14.
Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Lennon, Brian. 2010. In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual
States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Loreto, Paola. 2009. The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s
Hound. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Meylaerts, Reine. 2013. “Multilingualism as a Challenge for Translation
Studies.” In Routledge Handbook for Translation Studies, edited by Carmen
Millan-Valera and Francesca Bartrina, 519–33. London and New York:
Routledge.
Meylaerts, Reine, and Adriana Şerban. 2014. “Introduction. Multilingualism
at the Cinema and on Stage: A Translation Perspective.” Linguistica
Antverpiensia, New Series. Themes in Translation Studies 13: 1–13.
Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Palumbo-Liu, David. 2012. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a
Global Age. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
 References 131

Pollard, Velma. (1989) 2010. “Afterword.” In Considering Woman I and II, 76–7.
Leeds: Peepal Tree.
Pollard, Velma. (1993) 2003. From Jamaican Creole to Standard English: A
Handbook for Teachers. Mona: University of West Indies Press.
Pollard, Velma. (1994) 2000. Dread Talk, the Language of the Rastafari.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Pollard, Velma. 2008. Karl. London: Mango Publishing.
Pollard, Velma. 2012. “Languages in Jamaica: The Way Forward.” Language
Awareness Day. Edna Manley School for the Performing Arts. Panel
Discussion. Lecture Manuscript.
Pollard, Velma. 2014. “To Us, All Flowers Are Roses. Writing Ourselves into
the Literature of the Caribbean.” In Caribbean Literary Discourse. Voice and
Cultural Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean, edited by Barbara Lalla, Jean
D’Costa, Velma Pollard, 93–100. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama
Press.
Pollard, Velma. 2019. “In Conversation with Velma Pollard.” Interview by
Simona Bertacco. Altre Modernità. Disrespected Literatures: Histories and
Reversal of Linguistic Oppression (22): 76–88.
Pratt, Mary Louise. (1992) 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge.
Rushdie, Salman. 1983. Shame, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sakai, Naoki. 2009. “Dislocation in Translation.” TTR 221: 167–87.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. (1985) 2003. A Novel in Rotten English. Longman African
Writers. New York: Longman.
Scego, Igiaba. 2013. “Venice in the World.” AISCLI Newsletter 6 (Fall): 2–4.
Sommer, Doris, ed. 2003. Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations.
Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1993) 2000. “The Politics of Translation.” In The
Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 369–88.
London and New York: Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of
Globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Starosta, Anita. 2013. “Accented Criticism: Translation and Global Humanities.”
Boundary 2 40 (3): 163–80.
Tutuola, Amos. 1952. The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber.
Tymoczko, Maria. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Western Translation Theory:
Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation.” In Translating Others,
Vol. 1, edited by Theo Hermans, 13–32. Manchester: St Jerome.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2011. “The Poet’s Version; or an Ethics of Translation.”
Translation Studies 4 (2): 230–47.
Walcott, Derek. 1986a. “Sainte Lucie.” In Collected Poems 1948–1984, 309–23.
London and Boston: Faber and Faber.
132 References

Walcott, Derek. 1986b. “LII I Heard Them Marching the Leaf-Wet Roads of My
Head.” In Collected Poems 1948–1984, 506–7. London and Boston: Faber and
Faber.
Walcott, Derek. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.
Walcott, Derek. 1997a. “The Muse of History.” In What the Twilight Says, edited
by Derek Walcott, 36–64. London: Faber and Faber.
Walcott, Derek. 1997b. “A Letter to Chamoiseau.” In What the Twilight Says,
213–32. London: Faber and Faber.
Walcott, Derek. 2009. “Walcott in Italy, 2000–2001. Transcriptions of
Recordings.” In The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s
Hound, edited by Paola Loreto, 111–210. Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi.
Walcott, Rinaldo. (1997) 2003. Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada. Toronto:
Insomniac Press.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age
of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wing, Betsy. 1997. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Poetics of Relation, edited by
Édouard Glissant, xi–xx. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Young, Robert. 2003. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Chapter 3
Abani, Christopher. 2005. Graceland. New York: Picador.
Apter, Emily S. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Apter, Emily. 2008. “Untranslatables: A New World System.” New Literary
History 39: 581–98.
Balibar, Étienne. 2004. “Europe as Borderland,” presented at the Alexander
von Humboldt Lecture in Human Geography, University of Nijmengen,
November 10. http://gpm.ruhosting.nl/avh/Europe%20as%20Borderland.pdf
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by
the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination
and the Discourse of Colonialism.” In The Location of Culture, 94–120. With
a new preface by the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York:
Routledge.
Braudel, Fernand. 1995. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brooks, Peter. 1993. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cleave, Chris. 2009. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre.
 References 133

Conrad, Joseph, 1988. Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds

and Sources, Criticism, 3rd edition. Edited by Robert Kimbrough. A Norton
Critical Edition. New York: Norton.
Conrad, Joseph. (1912) 1988. A Personal Record. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press.
De Michelis, Lidia. 2017. “The Border Spectacle and the Dramaturgy of Hope
in Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa.” In Crisis, Risks and New Regionalism in
Europe. Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands, edited by Eike Kronshage,
Cecile Sandten, Claudia Gualtieri, and Roberto Pedretti, 219–35. Chemnitz:
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Enia, Davide. 2017. Appunti per Un Naufragio. Il Contesto 79. Palermo: Sellerio.
Erpenbeck, Jenny. 2015. Gehen, Ging, Gegangen: Roman. München: Knaus.
Evangelista, Stefano-Maria. 2009. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece:
Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilroy, Paul. 2014a. “Offshore Humanism: Human Rights and Hydrarchy.”
https://tomtrevor.net/2014/04/06/paul-gilroy-offshore-humanism-human-
rights-and-hydrarchy/
Gilroy, Paul. 2014b. “Lecture I. Suffering and Infrahumanity.” Tanner Lectures
on Human Values. Yale (USA): Yale University. http://tannerlectures.utah.
edu/Gilroy%20manuscript%20PDF.pdf
Gilroy, Paul. 2014c. “Lecture II. Humanities and a New Humanism.” Tanner
Lectures on Human Values. Cambridge, Mass: Yale University. http://
tannerlectures.utah.edu/Gilroy%20manuscript%20PDF.pdf
Hall, Stuart, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, eds. 1997. Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices. Culture, Media, and Identities.
London: Sage/The Open University.
Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History. Oxford and Malden: Blackwell.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2012. Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics, and Language.
London and New York: Routledge.
Inghilleri, Moira. 2017. Translation and Migration. London and New York:
Routledge.
Kane, Sarah. (1995) 2011. Blasted. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen
Drama.
Kerangal, Maylis de. 2016. Lampedusa. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Knibbe, Morgan. 2014. Shipwreck. Film. Netherlands/Italy, 15 min.
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. 1958. Il gattopardo. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Lustgarten, Anders. 2015. Lampedusa. Modern Plays. London: Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.
Malkin, Irad. 1998. The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mazzantini, Margaret. 2015. Mare al mattino. Milan: Mondadori.
Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the
Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
134 References

Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. “Translation and Migration.” Translation Studies 5 (3):

345–68.
Prosa, Lina. 2013. Trilogia del naufragio. Spoleto: Editoria e Spettacolo.
Rafael, Vicente L. 2016. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid
Wars of Translation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Redgrave, Vanessa. 2017. Sea Sorrow. Film. UK.
Said, Edward. 1984. “Reflections on Exile.” Granta Winter 12: 137–49.
Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon, eds. 2006. Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial
Difference. Traces 4. Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press.
Starosta, Anita. 2013. “Accented Criticism: Translation and Global Humanities.”
Boundary 2 40 (3): 163–80.
Vallorani, Nicoletta. 2017. Nessun Kurtz. Cuore di tenebra e le parole
dell’occidente. DeGenere. Milano: Mimesis.
Visconti, Luchino. 1963. Il gattopardo. Film. Italy.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age
of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 4
Alloula, Malek. 1986. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Aufderheide, Patricia. 2007. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York and
Cambridge: Zone Books, distributed by the MIT Press.
Badagliacca, Mario. “2016-ongoing.” The Game. Multimedia Project. https://
www.mariobadagliacca.com/the_game_2016_ongoing-cr6826
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by
Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1980. La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie. Cahiers Du
Cinéma Gallimard. Paris: Gallimard.
Bell, Vikki. 1999. “Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence. Paul
Gilroy and Arjun Appadurai in Conversation.” Theory, Culture & Society 16
(2): 21–40.
Berger, John. 2008. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series Directed
by Michael Dibb. Reissued as part of the Penguin Design Series. Penguin on
Design. London: British Broadcasting Corporation.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination
and the Discourse of Colonialism.” In The Location of Culture. With a new
preface by the author. Routledge Classics. 94–120. London and New York:
Routledge.
 References 135

Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors,

2nd edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.
London and New York: Verso.
Caccia, Andrea. 2000. L’estate vola. Film. Italy.
Caccia, Andrea. 2010. Vedozero. Film. Italy.
Cameron, Julia, Margaret Pattle, and Violet Hamilton. 1996. Annals of My
Glass House. Claremont and Seattle: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.
Distributed by University of Washington Press.
Corner, John. 1996. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary.
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, distributed
exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press.
Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New York:
Routledge.
Dalvit, Giulio. 2015. “Ecce Agnus Dei. Sulla morte di un giovane migrante.”
Artribune, September. http://www.artribune.com/2015/09/ecce-agnus-dei-
sulla-morte-di-un-giovane-migrante/
De Carolis, Mario. 2013. I Càrmeni. Ritratti improbabili. Art Project. http://
www.mariodecarolis.it/project/i-carmeni/
De Luca, Erri, and Alessandro Gassman. 2014. Solo andata. Film. Italy.
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire masques blancs. Paris: Seuil.
Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” In Art after Modernism:
Rethinking Representation, edited by Brian Wallis and Marcia Tucker,
417–32. New York: The Museum of Contemporary Art.
Foucault, Michel. 1998. The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley.
Amended reprint. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books.
Galeano, Eduardo, Fred Ritchin, and Sebastião Salgado, eds. 1990. An Uncertain
Grace: Photographs by Sebastiao Salgado. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gikandi, Simon. 2001. “Globalization and the Claim of Postcoloniality.” The
South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (3): 627–58.
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color
Line. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2014. “Offshore Humanism: Human Rights and Hydrarchy.”
https://tomtrevor.net/2014/04/06/paul-gilroy-offshore-humanism-human-
rights-and-hydrarchy/
Hall, Stuart. 1993. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited
by Simon During, 90–103. London and New York: Routledge.
Hokenson, Walsh, and Marcella Munson. 2007. The Bilingual Text. History and
Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Knibbe, Morgan. 2014. Those Who Feel The Fire Burning. Film. Netherlands/
Greece/Italy.
McElvaney, Kevin. 2015. #RefugeeCameras. Photography Project. http://kevin-
mcelvaney.com/portfolio/project-refugeecameras/
136 References

Polezzi, Loredana. 2012. “Translation and Migration.” Translation Studies 5 (3):

345–68.
Sentilles, Sarah. 2017. Draw Your Weapons. New York: Random House.
Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. 2004. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara
Walker. Durham: Duke University Press.
Vallorani, Nicoletta. 2018. “Forms of Loss: Dead Bodies and Other Objects.”
In (Post)Colonial Passages: Incursions and Excursions across the Literatures
and Cultures in English, edited by Silvia Albertazzi, Francesco Cattani, Rita
Monticelli, and Federica Zullo, 106–18. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age
of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 5
Almond, Kyle. 2019. This Is What the US-Mexico Border Looks Like.
Photographs by John Moore/Getty Images. Story by Kyle Almond, CNN.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/12/politics/border-wall-cnnphotos/
Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability.
London and New York: Verso.
Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London and New York:
Routledge.
Badagliacca, Mario. “2016-ongoing.” The Game. Multimedia Project. https://
www.mariobadagliacca.com/the_game_2016_ongoing-cr6826
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2004. The Location of Culture. With a new preface by
the author. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi K. 2018. “Migration, Rights, and Survival: The Importance of the
Humanities Today.” From the European South (3): 7–12.
Blumczynski, Piotr. 2016. Ubiquitous Translation. London and New York:
Routledge.
Casteglione, Baldassar. (1528) 1998. Il libro del Cortegiano. Edited by Walter
Barberis. Turin: Einaudi.
Cleave, Chris. 2009. The Other Hand. London: Sceptre.
Di Maio, Alessandra. 2013. “The Mediterranean or Where Africa Does (Not)
Meet Italy: Andrea Segre’s A Sud Di Lampedusa (2006).” In The Cinemas of
Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, edited by Sabine
Schrader and Daniel Winkler, 41–52. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing.
Farrier, David. 2011. Post-Colonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary before the Law.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
 References 137

Hall, Stuart. 1987. “Minimal Selves.” In The Real Me: Post-Modernism and the
Question of Identity, ICA, Document 6. 44–6. London: The Institute of
Contemporary Arts.
Hutchinson, Ron. 2009. “Durand’s Line.” In The Great Game: Afghanistan, edited
by Tricycle Theatre, 31–47. Oberon Modern Plays. London: Oberon Books.
Jacir, Emily. 2016. Via Crucis. Installation. Milan: Chiesa di San Raffaele.
Luiselli, Valeria. 2017. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.
Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.
Miéville, China. (2009) 2011. The City & the City. London: Pan Books.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2015. “The Drowned and The Sacred: To See The
Unspeakable.” Blog. HOW TO SEE THE WORLD. August 29. https://wp.nyu.
edu/howtoseetheworld/2015/08/29/auto-draft-73/
Perkins, Ed. 2018. Black Sheep. Documentary. UK.
Philip, NourbeSe. 2008. Zong! (As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng).
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Rafael, Vicente L. 2016. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid
Wars of Translation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rebecchini, Damiano. 2016. “Il Traduttore Come Autore.” PEML—Prassi
Ecdotiche della Modernità Letteraria (1): 265–71.
Sakai, Naoki. 2010. “Translation and the Figure of the Border.” Profession 10:
25–34.
Sakai, Naoki, and Jon Solomon, eds. 2006. Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial
Difference. Traces 4. Hong Kong and London: Hong Kong University Press.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2018. The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming
of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Smith, Ali. (2016) 2017. Autumn. New York: Anchor Books.
Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age
of World Literature. Literature Now. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wood, Dennis. 1992. The Power of Maps. London and New York: Guilford Press.
 Index

Abani, C. 70 Bennett, L. 49, 52

accent 1, 16, 48, 64, 71 Berger, J. 13, 92, 103
accented criticism 8, 64 Berman, S. 7
accented reading 16, 49, 51, 57–8, Bertacco, S. 15–16, 48, 51, 65, 69, 120
64–6 Bhabha, H. 1–6, 15, 26, 41, 44, 49, 74,
activism 2, 13, 27, 77, 115 86, 90, 99, 107, 114, 120
African cultures Bickerton, D. 66
born-translated 70 Blumczynski, P. 8, 44, 121
migrants 14, 76, 83, 100 Boehmer, E. 96
agency 2, 4, 6, 26–7, 42, 91–2, 108 borders 1, 4–6, 8, 11, 16–17, 22, 26–7,
Akbar, A. 9 30, 39, 43–4, 71, 74–5, 80,
Alighieri, D. 65 82–4, 92, 95–6, 99, 111–15,
Alloula, M. 89 118–19
Almond, K. 112 border-crossings 5–8, 75
anglophone cultural studies 3, 6, 10, metaphor 111–14
49, 53–5, 58–9, 63 symbolic and cultural border
appropriation xii, 8, 48, 82, 99 (US and Mexico) 112
Apter, E. 5, 8, 28, 30, 49, 74–6, 86, symbolic thresholds 111–12, 114
115 Brand, D. 16, 49, 52, 61–4
Arduini, S. 11 Brathwaite, K. 49, 52–3, 65–6
Ashcroft, B. 63, 66 Braudel, F. 70
asylum seekers 15, 23, 39–40, 72, 75, Breiner, L. A. 55
105 Brexit 17, 113, 120
Attridge, D. 65, 121 Brooks, P. 85
Atwood, M. 61 Butler, J. 17, 103, 105
Aufderheide, P. 87–8
Azoulay, A. 18, 27, 95, 107 Caccia, A. 17, 105–7
Cameron, J. 95
Badagliacca, M. 13, 17, 92–3, 95–6, 98 Caribbean Creoles 51–64
Baer, B. J. 1, 11, 13 French St. Lucian Creole 55–6
Bakhtin, M. M. 15, 88 Jamaican Creole (JC) 60
Balibar, É. 71 Standard Jamaican English (SJE) 60
Barnes, J. 9 Trinidadian English Creole (TEC)
Barthes, R. 92, 97 62–3
Bassnett, S. 8 Carrington, B. 7
Beattie, P. 57 Casas, M. 61
Bell, V. 106 Castiglione, B. 111, 120
Bellos, D. 22, 24–5 Chamberlin, E. 61
Benjamin, W. 2, 74 Chambers, R. 43
 Index 139

Chamoiseau, P. 56 Evangelista, S. 78
Chawla, R. 17, 103, 105 exclusion 1, 4, 115
Ch’ien, E. N-M. 49
Cimarosti, R. 54, 57 familiar 13, 25, 73–4, 89, 94–6, 98,
Cleave, C. 17, 75–6, 119 100–2, 105, 116
complexity xvi, 4, 40, 44, 47, 85 familiarizing 100–8
Condé, M. 10 Fanon, F. 9–10, 97
Conrad, J. 4, 48–9, 49, 69, 77–8 Farah, U. C. A. 17, 70–1
Corner, J. 88 Farrier, D. 15, 17, 114
Costanzo, S. 10 Ferrante, E. 9–10
Covid-19 44 foreign x–xiv, xvi, 16, 22, 24–5, 50,
Creole poetics 16, 56, 58 64, 74, 76, 81, 111–13, 119
Creolization 51–2, 54, 66 foreign relation xii–xiv, xvi
Cronin, M. 4, 8, 91, 108 Foucault, M. 100
cultural translation 3, 26, 30, 44, 73
Cumber-Dance, D. 58–9 Galeano, E. 99
Curti, L. 6 Gassman, A. 17, 90
Gavalda, A. 9
Dabydeen, D. 54 gaze 17, 77, 85, 87–9, 91–2, 95–6,
Dalvit, G. 101 107–9, 114
Damrosch, D. 8 Genette, G. 65
D’Costa, J. 51, 58 Gentzler, E. 4, 8, 22–4
DeCamp, D. 66 Gikandi, S. 13, 106
De Carolis, M. 17, 97–9 Gilroy, P. 5, 7, 78–9, 85–6, 96, 106
de León, C. 40 Glissant, E. 52, 66
De Luca, E. 13, 17, 90 global 1–9, 11–12, 17, 21–2, 27–8, 41,
De Michelis, L. 79–80 44, 47–50, 64, 71, 74, 83, 98–9,
Demir, N. 17, 101–2 106, 113, 115, 120–1
Derrida, J. 64 humanities 5, 50, 64
Devi, M. 64 Godard, B. 21
dialect xiv, xvi, 16, 29, 52–4, 64 Goldstein, A. 10
Di Maio, A. 11, 14, 23, 112 Grutman, R. 49–50
dislocation 11, 114
documentary filmmaking 87–8, 105 Hall, S. 4–6, 17, 70, 100, 102, 111
Durzi, G. 9–10 Hodge, M. 52
dystopia 106–7, 114 Hokenson, W. 91
Horden, P. 70
Edwards, V. 47 hospitality x, 41, 72–3
Enia, D. 17, 80–1 Huggan, G. 65
Erpenbeck, J. 17, 73 Hutchinson, R. 112
European cultures 96, 101, 105
African migrants 14, 100 images xv, xviii, 13, 17, 27, 41, 44, 86,
redistribution of migrants 116, 88–91, 98, 101, 103, 107, 109
118–19 audience 87–91, 105
140 Index

coding 88–90, 92, 100–2, 105 Loreto, P. 57

decoding 88–91, 96, 100, 102 loss 11, 21, 73, 76, 78–80
representation 88–91, 95–100, Lotman, J. M. 6
105, 107–9 Lovelace, E. 49, 52
Western viewers 89, 91–2, 96, Luiselli, V. 27, 39–44, 118–19
99–103, 105–9 Lustgarten, A. 17, 70, 77–81, 84
Immigration and Custom Lyotard, J-F. 6
Enforcement (ICE) 119
inclusion 1, 4, 115 MacEvitt, C. 35–6
Inghilleri, M. 1, 3–4, 23, 40–1, 72, 77 Maitland, S. 3
invasion 3, 48 Malkin, I. 15, 70
Markmann, C. L. 10
Jacir, E. 16, 28–39, 42, 44, 115 Marxism 6
Jadhav, P. 2 Mazzantini, M. 17, 81–2, 85
Jameson, F. 65 McElvaney, K. 17, 108–9
Johnson, L. K. 49, 52 Mediterranean Sea 12–16, 36, 39,
69–74, 76–7, 81–2, 84, 88, 108,
Kane, S. 77 111, 113, 115
Kant, I. 41 bordering 71, 74–5, 80, 83–4
Kerangal, M. de 17, 72–3, 86 diachronic awareness 71–2
Knibbe, M. 17, 86–7 exile narratives 70–1, 76, 78, 81–3
Kreiden, T. 9 geography 69, 75, 77–8, 83
Kurdi, A. 100–1, 105 mass migration 69–72, 85
migration crisis 81–6
Lalla, B. 51–3, 55 otherness, notion of 73–4
Lampedusa, G. T. di 32, 36, 70, 73, Western 73–7, 81, 83, 85–6
77–8, 80–1, 83–6 Merleau-Ponty, M. 10
language 1–2, 4–9, 11–12, 14–17, Messina, A. da 92, 96, 98
21–5, 27, 39, 41–2, 47–66, Meylaerts, R. 50
71, 73–7, 79, 83, 85–6, 88, Mezzadra, S. 5, 8, 11, 23, 26, 71, 75,
95–7, 100–1, 106, 108, 112–15, 83–4, 86, 115–16
119–21 Miéville, C. 114
biopolitics of 108 Mignolo, W. 17, 26, 48
Lansdowne, J. 35–6, 38 migrants. See also border-crossings
Lennon, B. 49 collective experiences 22–3, 76, 86
Levinas, E. 121 forms 17
Levinson, H. 40 redistribution 1, 26
linguistic (life) xii–xvi, xviii, 1–2, respect 81–6
5, 17, 22, 25–6, 40–1, 48–50, unforgetting 76–81
52–6, 59–61, 63–5, 71–2, 75, and the unknown 72–6
99, 108, 113. See also non- UN statistics 44
linguistic migration 1–6, 8, 11–18, 22–4, 26–8,
literary texts 48, 52, 58–9, 65–6, 120 30, 36, 39–42, 44–5, 47–8,
location 1, 4–5, 10, 21, 26, 39, 80, 115 67, 69–72, 74–5, 77, 79–82,
 Index 141

85, 88, 90–1, 96, 98, 100, post-translation studies 24

103, 105–9, 111–21. See also Pratt, M. L. 7, 49
Mediterranean Sea Prosa, L. 17, 83–5
diversity of 14 Purcell, N. 70
European artists and 72
forced 74, 77, 81–2, 88, 105, 107 Rafael, V. 5, 26, 86, 115
postcolonial literature 47–9 Rankine, C. 40
translational aspect 8–15 “Reader-as-Translator” or “RAT” 64
visual translations 100–8 reading xv–xvi, 1–2, 5, 9, 16–17, 23, 27,
monolingualism 16, 47, 49, 51, 58 39, 44, 49–52, 54, 57–9, 64–6,
Munro, A. 61 90, 99, 114, 116, 119–20. See also
accent, accented reading
Naipaul, V. S. 2 Rebecchini, D. 111
narration 12, 31, 36, 39, 42–3, 56, Redgrave, V. 17, 70, 77, 81
60, 70–1, 76, 78, 81–2, 85–7, Reid, V. 52
89–90, 102–3, 105–7, 114 relics 31, 36, 38–9, 115
Neilson, B. 71, 75, 83–4, 86, 115–16 relocation 1–5, 26, 45, 48, 75, 112,
Nergaard, S. 11 114–16. See also Europe;
Nichols, G. 49 Mediterranean Sea; migrants
non-linguistic xiii, xvi definition 1
as translation 115–19
Ondaatje, M. 61 representation xiii, 4, 6, 11, 13,
Orwell, G. 106 16–17, 25, 44, 69–71, 73, 76,
otherness 18, 50, 64, 73–4, 86, 100, 81–3, 85–6, 88–91, 95–100,
107, 114, 119 105, 107, 109, 114, 120
outsidedness 88, 107 resistance 6, 23, 28
respect 14, 74, 81–6, 107
Palumbo-Liu, D. 50 responsibility 10, 27, 50, 64, 105, 107,
Perkins, E. 118 120, 121
pharmakon 71, 76 Rich, A. 2
Philcox, R. 10 Rothenberg, J. 52
Philip, N. 52, 116 Rubio, D. M. 8
photography 88–9, 94, 97, 105 Rushdie, S. 11, 15, 23, 47–9
planetary 2, 11, 115
Polezzi, L. 4, 23–4, 26–7, 41, 72, 88, Said, E. 13, 22, 26, 76, 82, 86
91, 107–8 Sakai, N. 5, 8, 21, 24–5, 41, 66, 73–4,
Pollard, V. 16, 49, 52, 58 114–16
postcolonial 64, 70, 96, 106 Salgado, S. 99
accented language 49–51 Salles, E. 103–5
Caribbean vocabulary 51–64 Santos, B. d. S. 2, 14, 26
literature 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 16, 26, Scego, I. 29
47–50, 54, 65–6 schema(s) xvi, 1, 11, 16, 21–7, 40–2,
and translation 47–9 44, 47, 113
poststructuralism 6 self-translation 91
142 Index

Selvon, S. 52 77, 79–82, 85, 88, 90–1, 96, 98,

semiotics 6 100, 103, 105–9, 111–21
Sentilles, S. 18, 27, 88–9 and postcolonial literature 47–9
Shakespeare, W. 65 as relocation 115–19
Shaw, G. D. 88 visual representation 107–9
Simon, S. 5 translational poetics 51, 57
Smith, A. 111, 113 translingual 16, 48, 116
Sofo, G. 11 Trivedi, H. 8, 27
Solomon, J. 114–15 Tutuola, A. 49
Sommer, D. 5, 26, 49, 54, 121 Tymoczko, M. 8, 47
Soyinka, W. 11
Spivak, G. C. 5, 26, 49, 64 untranslatability x, 30, 74
Starosta, A. 8–9, 50, 64, 71, 74, 76 Uspenskij, B. A. 6
stereotype 70, 74–5, 79, 86, 89, 97, 99,
103, 107 Vallorani, N. 16–17, 74, 86, 102, 120
structuralism 6 Venuti, L. 5, 8, 44, 50
vernacular 2, 48, 57
Tedlock, D. 52 Via Crucis/Via Dolorosa 28, 31, 35–6,
terza rima 57 38–9
test, Aufgabe x–xii, xv–xvi, 16, 23, Visconti, L. 73
40, 71 visual text 87–8, 90, 100
testimony/testimonial 42–3, 72, 77, familiarity and unfamiliarity 89,
87, 89–90, 97, 107, 116, 119. 91, 96–102, 105
See also witnessing pics, pictures 92–100
tragedy 12–13, 73, 81, 85–6, 95, 101, vulnerability 7, 17, 79, 101, 114
103, 106, 115
transition/transitional xiii–xvi, 2, 39, Walcott, D. 52, 55, 57
59, 79 Walkowitz, R. 5, 14, 16, 49–50,
Translatio 31, 35–6, 38–9 69–70, 76–7, 87, 110
translation 1–18, 21–31, 35, 38–45, ways of seeing 27
47–51, 56–7, 64–6, 69–75, Williams, J. 9
82, 86, 88–9, 91, 95–6, 101–2, Williams, R. 6
105–10, 111–21 Wing, B. 52
as border/bordering 111–15 witnessing xvi, 36, 39, 41, 43–4, 61–2,
and Caribbean literature 90, 95. See also testimony/
51–64 (see also postcolonial, testimonial
literature) Wiwa, K. S. 49
cultural 3, 26, 30, 44, 73, 115 Wood, D. 112
global citizenship 120–21 Wood, J. 10
interlingual 3, 28 worldly knowledge 21–3
literacy 9, 11, 16, 23, 27, 120–21
and migration 1–6, 8, 11–18, Young, R. 48
22–4, 26–8, 30, 36, 39–42,
44–5, 47–8, 67, 69–72, 74–5, Zurbaràn, F. de 101
143
144
145
146
147
148