"History in Translation" Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context, 1992 by Tejaswini Niranjana
Introduction
The article examines the "positive" or "utopian" response to the postcolonial condition developed by Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation: her attempt to harness translation in the service of decolonization.It traces a postcolonial myth moving from pre coloniality through the recent colonial past and current postcoloniality to an imagined future state of decolonization in order to contrast nationalist versions of that myth, with their emphasis on the purity of the precolonial and decolonized states, to postcolonialist versions, which in- sist that all four states are mixed.Niranjana draws on Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" in order to explore the ways in which translating, like rereading/re- writing history. involves a "citing" or "quoting" of words from one context to another, allowing translation to be used by colonists for purposes of colonial subjugation but also by postcolonial subjects for purposes of decolonization.Finally, the article contrasts Niranjana's Benjaminian sense of literalism as the best decolonizing translational mode with the variety of approaches explored by Vicente Rafael in Contracting Colonialism.
Key points
Situating Translation
Translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity. Translation translation becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity.The context is one of contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races, languages.
The discourses of philosophy, history, anthropology, philology, linguistics, and literary interpretation, the colonial "subject"-constructed through technologies or practices of power knowledge is brought into being within multiple discourses and on multiple sites. One such site is translation.
Philosophical notions of reality,representation, and knowledge.Reality is seen as something unproblematic, "out there"; knowledge involves a representation of this reality; and representation provides direct, unmediated access to a transparent reality.
Purposes of colonial domination; contend that, simultaneously, translation in the colonial context produces and supports a conceptual economy that works into the discourse of Western philosophy to function as a philosopheme.
Jacques Derrida suggests, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the "field" of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a "conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted."
In forming a certain kind of subject, in presenting particular versions of the colonized, translation brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation. These concepts, and what they allow us to assume, completely occlude the violence that accompanies the construction of the colonial subject.
Translation thus produces strategies of containment. By employing certain modes of representing the other-which it thereby also brings· into being-translation reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.
Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 dismissal of indigenous Indian learning as outdated and irrelevant, which prepared the way for the introduction of English education.
Translation functions as a transparent presentation of something that already exists, although the "original" is actually brought into being through translation.
Tejaswini's concern here is to explore the place of translation in contemporary Euro-American literary theory (using the name of this "discipline" in a broad sense) through a set of interrelated readings.
Chapter 2 "Translation" works in the traditional discourse of translation studies and in ethnographic writing. Discussing the last two, which are somewhat marginal to literary theory, may nevertheless help us sharpen our critique of translation. Caught in an idiom of fidelity and betrayal that assumes an unproblematic notion of representation, translation studies fail to ask questions about the historicity" Of translation; ethnography, on the other hand, has recently begun to question both the innocence of representation and the long-standing a symmetries of translation.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5, main focus is the work of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin (an earlier critic who is becoming increasingly important to post-structuralist thinkers). My analysis shows how translation functions as a "figure" in all three thinkers, becoming synonymous or associated with a major preoccupation in each: allegory or literature in de Man, the problematics of representation and intentionality in Derrida, and the question of materialist historiography in Benjamin.
Final chapter, with the help of a translation from Kannada, a South Indian language, into English, Niranjana discusses the "uses" of post-structuralism in post-colonial space.
The rethinking a task of great urgency for a postcolonial theory attempting to make sense of "subjects" already living in translation, Imaged and re-imaged by colonial ways of seeing-seeks to reclaim the notion of translation by deconstructing it and reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance.
Beginning to describe the post-colonial, we might reiterate some of the brute facts of colonialism.
Post-structuralism that is significant for a rethinking of translation is its critique of historicism, which shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological (positing a certain end) nature of traditional historiography.
Translation as Interpellation
Translator and scholar, Jones was responsible for the most influential introduction of a textualized India to Europe.
Warren Hastings, the governor-general, as patron. It was primarily through the efforts of the members of the Asiatic Society, themselves administrators and officials of the East India Company's Indian Government, that translation would help" gather in" and "rope off" the Orient.
A historicist, teleological model of civilization that, coupled with a the notion of translation presupposing transparency of representation, helps construct a powerful version of the "Hindu" that later writers of different philosophical and political persuasions incorporated into their texts in an almost seamless fashion.
The most significant nodes of jones's works are (a) the need for translation by the European, since the natives are unreliable interpreters of their own laws and culture; (b) the desire to be a lawgiver, to give the Indians their "own" law; and (c) the desire to "purify" Indian culture and speak on its behalf.
The idea of the "submissive" Indians, their inability to be free, and the native laws that do not permit the question of liberty to be raised are thus brought together in the concept of Asian despotism.
Two main kinds of translators of Indian literature existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: admin like William Jones and Christian missionaries like the Serampore Baptists William Carey and William Ward.
The critique of historicism may help us formulate a complex notion of historicity, which would include the" effective history" of the text; this phrase encompasses questions such as: Who uses/interprets the text? How is it used, and for what? Both the critique of representation and the critique of historicism empower the post-colonial theorist to undertake an analysis of what Homi Bhabha (following Foucault) has called technologies of colonial power.
The Question of "History "
Samual Weber charges Jameson with using the gesture of "Capitalizing History" to address the "challenge of post-structuralist thought". Weber's is one of the latest salvoes in the prolonged skirmishing between the defenders of "post-structuralism" and those who accuse it of denying "history". If the former polemicize against history as "phallogocentrism", the latter argue that is an "untranscendable horizon". Neither specify whether the "history" in question refers to a mode of writing history or to the "past" itself.
Tejaswini's central concern here is not to elaborate on the battle for "history" now being staged in Euro-American theory but to ask a series of questions from a strategically "partial" perspective that of an emergent post-colonial practice willing to profit from the insights of post-structuralism, while at the same time demanding ways of writing history in order to make sense of how subjectification operates.
Her purposes, I take historicity to mean although not unproblematically effective history, or that part of the past that is still operative in the present.I use the word historicity to avoid invoking History with a capital H, my concern being with "Local" practices of translation that require no overarching theory to contain them.
As Foucault declares, "effective history affirms knowledge as perspective", it may be seen as a radical kind of "presentism", which we may be able to work from. The facts of "history" are inescapable for the post-colonial, since attention to history is in a sense demanded by the post-colonial situation, post-colonial theory has to formulate a narrativizing strategy in addition to deconstructive one.
Louis Althusser's critique of historicism, which leads him, in Jameson's words, to formulate the notion that "history is a process without a telos or a subject", "a repudiation of master narratives and their twin categories of narrative closure (telos) and of character (subject of history)".
History and translation function, perhaps,under the same order of representation, truth, and presence, creating coherent and transparent texts through the repressions of difference, and participating thereby in the process of colonial domination. The double inscription Derrida mentions has a parallel in Walter Benjamin's strategy of citation or quotation.For Benjamin, the historical materialist quotes without quotation marks in a method akin to montage. It is one way of revealing the constellations a past age forms with the present without submitting to a simple historical continuum, to an order of origin and telos.
The hybrid therefore, involves translation, deformation displacement. The nation of hybridity, which is of great importance for a subaltern critique of historiography as well as for a critique of traditional notions of translation, is both "ambitious and historically complex".
To restrict "hybridity", or what is called "living in translation", to a post- colonial elite is to deny the pervasiveness, however heterogeneous, of the transformations wrought across class boundaries by colonial and neocolonial domination.
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