Translation and Decolonisation Interdisciplinary Approaches Translation, Politics and Society Series

Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches offers compelling explorations of the pivotal role that translation plays in the complex and necessarily incomplete process of decolonisation. In a world where translation has historically been a tool of empire and colonisation, this collection shines the spotlight on the potential for translation to be a driving force in decolonial resistance. The book bridges the divide between translation studies and the decolonial turn in the social sciences and humanities, revealing the ways in which translation can challenge colonial imaginaries, institutions, and practice, and how translation opens up South-to-South conversations. It brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and fields, including sociology, literature, languages, migration, politics, anthropology, and more, offering interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives. By examining both the theoretical and practical aspects of this intersection, the chapters of this agenda-setting collection explore the impact of translation on decolonisation and highlight the need to decolonise translation studies itself. The book illuminates the transformative power of translation in transcending linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries.

Acknowledgements

Claire Chambers and Ipek Demir, Introduction

1: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translating into English

2: Kathryn Batchelor, Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Translation: Compatibilities and Contradictions

3: Paul F. Bandia, Reparative Translation, Decoloniality, Metacoloniality

4: Tejaswini Niranjana, Feminism and Translation in India

5: Abdelmajid Hannoum, On Translation Ideology

6: Claire Chambers, Forked Tongues: Translation and (De)colonisation in Two Global Novels by Contemporary Women Writers

7: Sara de Jong, Armed with Words: (De)colonising Translation in the US-led NATO war in Afghanistan (2001–2021)

8: Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Translation as Decolonial Method: On the (Un)Translatability of Human Rights Demands and the Coloniality of Migration in Refugee Protest in Germany

9: Haider Shahbaz, Fahmida Riaz’s Āwāz: Translation and Solidarities in the Global South

10: Peiyu Yang, Translating the Other: Ghassan Kanafani’s Travelogue ... And Then Arose Asia

11: Gargi Binju, Writing Diasporic In-Betweenness: South Asians in Colonial and Postcolonial East Africa in the Novels of M. G. Vassanji

12: Maureen Freely, Translation as Activism, Translators as Activists

13: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Finding Our Way: Dialogue Among Our Languages Is the Way to the Unity of African Peoples

Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, where she teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing in English from South Asia, the Perso-Arab world, and their diasporas. Her books include Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora, Britain Through Muslim Eyes, and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels.

Ipek Demir is Professor of Diaspora Studies and Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) at the University of Leeds. Her publications span race, diaspora, migration, decoloniality, and interdisciplinarity. Her research has been funded by the EU, ESRC, and AHRC. She is also the author of Diaspora as Translation and Decolonisation (2002).