Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

doi:10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

Volume 4 Issue 3

Sep. 2022

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2021, 4(3): 409-427. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

Citation:

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2021, 4(3): 409-427. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2021, 4(3): 409-427. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

Citation:

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2021, 4(3): 409-427. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

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Translation and the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies

doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20214301

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak^,

Columbia University

Received Date: 2021-04-07
Accepted Date: 2021-05-10

Abstract

Abstract

This essay suggests that independence from colonialism is brought in by groups that are not in class contact with the general population. Therefore, the democracy imposed by this group comes undone and older, pre-colonial structures of power come in to underguard the polity. Indian postcoloniality can offer an example. The solution suggested is a holistic education of the largest sectors of the electorate, although at the moment it can only be entertained as a dream. Next, Talal Asad's Secular Translations is considered. This book offers anthropological fieldwork as a way of accessing the other. Asad sublates this into a reading of each Q'uranic recitation as an occasion of translation. This article connects that sublation to epistemological performance as the practice of the humanities beyond the discipline. The solution offered is of teaching imaginative activism, again holistically from the subaltern to the elite. The essay next cites a speech given in Osaka right after the presentation of the Kyoto prize to the author—which offers translation as activity rather than convenience. In conclusion, by way of Édouard Glissant and Gary Okihiro, the article suggests an understanding of history as creolity and a shift from nationalist language thinking to archipelagic thinking,where we understand that the world is an island, and that, by analogy, in globality,we are in islands of language in an ocean of traces.
- heritage,
- postcolonial studies,
- translation

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References(13)

References

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