Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity

Yiorgos Kalogeras, Cathy C. Waegner, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Cathy C. Waegner

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000026047
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: North American Literary Criticism

This volume seeks to weave applications of the dynamic concept of resonance to ethnic studies. Resonance refers to the ever broadening, multidirectional effects of movement or action, a concept significant for many disciplines. The individual chapters exchange the concept of static "intertextuality" for that of interactive "resonance, " which encourages consideration of the mutual and processual influences among readings, paradigms, and social engagement in cultural analysis. International scholars of literary and cultural studies, linguistics, history, politics, or ethno-environmental studies contribute their work in this volume. Each chapter examines a specific ethnic phenomenon in terms of relevant literature, lived experience and theoretical approaches, or historical intervention, relating the given case study to parameters of resonance. The book offers dialogic transnational interchange, a play of eclectic ethnic voices, inquiries, perspectives, and differences. The studies in this interdisciplinary volume show that – through resonant engagement with(in) and between works – literary production can both enhance and disturb cultural narratives of ethnicity.

Part I
Reverberations and Dissonance in Performance and Dynamic Memorialization

1 In Search of Translational Resonance With Patel and Rau’s Stage Work Who Am I? Think Again¹

Tingting Hui

Ever since the prefix “trans-” began to traverse gender studies, postcolonial theory, and globalization discourse (transgender, transculturation, transnationalism—just to name a few), translation, in the same spirit, has become a celebrity concept that restlessly circulates from one discipline to another, from one local context to another. Immanent to the physical and conceptual act of border crossing between languages, cultures, and disciplines, translation conjures up the old craft of grafting, spurring the expectation of newness, while at the same time incarnating an anxiety over the legitimacy of such mobility. It is, therefore, not by chance that translation is often discussed in relation to transgression. Primarily as a linguistic performance that renders a text into another language, translation reaches out after the original, yet extends to a degree of opacity that shuns itself from the original. Aspiring to capture what is untranslatable, the new form of life manifested in the alien language seems to echo and expel the original simultaneously.

Among many discussions over the relation between translation and original, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (first published 1923) stands as a signpost. While the prevailing discourse at that moment upheld the original as the ideal that the translation should strive to mimic and measure up to, Benjamin, on one hand, acknowledges that the intention of the translator is different from that of the writer (one being abstract and derivative, the other concrete and initial), and, on the other hand, proposes that translation shall not be taken as an unwanted bastard seeking for parentage nor a parasite which imperils the welfare of the original. Precisely because of the derivative nature, Benjamin suggests, the translation could recast light on the original in terms of its translatability and untranslatability, elevating it to a higher linguistic realm while at once making it less complete, yearning for a pure language that reveals itself in translation.

“The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original,” writes Benjamin (258). In general, to echo means to repeat and resonate; it is to hear the same sound twice in varying intensities and durations. However, if, by the word “echo,” Benjamin maintains that translation and the original are closely related, it does not entail that translation has to be equivalent to the original text. Not only is it an impossible task to perform, but also the metaphor of the echo concerns rather, for Benjamin, the residue of intention that becomes amplified in a foreign but felicitous environment. Diffused, faraway, and with longer duration, the echo exhibits a tint of strangeness that was hidden and unobserved in the original sound. Likewise, the translator, as Benjamin envisions, is an exemplary figure who, through the act of translation, facilitates the conditions under which the echo of the original text can return and resonate in a foreign language, whose linguistic existence becomes strangely manifest, conscious, and augmented.

Yet, there seems to be a limit to the “redeeming” power of the translator as a facilitator. At least according to Judith Butler, the misfire of the translation is rather of a constitutive kind. “In fact, it is unclear whether translations can ever be other than ‘bad’ or, at least, have some badness in them,” writes Butler in “Betrayal’s Felicity” (2004), “since the original has to be crossed, if not partially mutilated, with the emergence of the translation itself” (82). There is in translation, as Butler observes, a conflicting tendency to adhere to the original as well as to break from it, a tendency that cannot be reconciled through the translator, even if he or she is a good one. If the Benjaminian translator resembles very much a mediator, a pacifier, Butler envisions the translator to be a constructive pessimist, a professional “traducer.”² Deriving this idea from the translation practice and theoretical reflection of Barbara Johnson, Butler argues that the antithesis of prohibition and transgression, which seems to lead translation to a “scandalous” practice, is, in fact, the translator’s felicity in the sense that, as Butler cites Johnson, “only translation can betray without necessarily instating the polarity from which it deviates” (83).

Whereas Benjamin formulates the relation between the original and translation in terms of echoing and resonating, Butler and Johnson emphasize that translation implies a process of divergence and resistance after brief moments of resonance with the original, and the act of translation will inevitably release the noise of betrayal. What does it mean to say that, combining the two approaches, translation and the original simultaneously resonate with and diverge from one another? As a translator, how can one practice translation as a transformative act without inhibiting the deep resonance between translation and the original? Is it possible to craft an art of betrayal with care and creativity? These questions, while relevant to translation as a linguistic performance, are urgent as well with regard to cross-cultural encounters and trans-lingual exchanges in a postcolonial context. In an era in which translation shapes or even defines how we relate to other people and to ourselves, it is no longer, as we realize, a linguistic practice that we can simply do away with but a mode of existence that we come to inhabit. Correspondingly, the problematics of translation—such as the hierarchy between the original and translation, translatability and untranslatability, faithfulness, and unfaithfulness of the translator—are not to be simply wished away but worked through and against constantly. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is threefold—to lay bare the problematics of translation, to situate and investigate translation in a postcolonial context, and to search for the possibility of forming a relationship based on what I call translational resonance.

To address these questions, I propose to look at a piece of stage work Who Am I? Think Again performed by Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh in 2013. At the beginning of this performance, we hear Patel speak Mandarin and see him squat on the chair with his kurta pajama on. All of these elements—his appearance, clothes, language, and posture—appear quite foreign and original to a Western audience, raising, as a consequence, the expectation of translation. Rau plays along with this expectation, fittingly performing the translation in English at intervals. We are convinced that translation is done for our benefit until the moment when Rau reveals that the artist himself is a native speaker of English. Here all the prerequisites of translation appear to be met, only that the very act of translation turns out to be linguistically unmotivated and redundant. We are thus “tricked” into believing that translation is what we need. Indeed, nothing should prevent us from dismissing the scene as a mere parody of translation. The questions are, however, What if we take it seriously and use it to rethink the relation of the translation to the original? When translation is performed but not out of necessity, how shall we re-adjust our frame of interpretation and negotiate for a new mode of relation via translation?

One-Way Valorization: Mapping Out the Politics of Translation

Translation, in a less tension-loaded way of thinking, implies a mode of contact and encounter that inevitably leads to the negotiation of the border between self and other. The original is not an authoritative and superior self, neither is the translation a derivative nor devouring other. That being said, what prohibits the practice of translation from a deep resonance with the original is not only a perceptive inequality between the two but also the fact that it is done (and cannot be otherwise) in a specific social and political context. The demystification of the supreme aura of the original cannot radically alter the fact that the practice of translation is firmly embedded in the ongoing disproportional distribution of knowledge and power that valorizes one language as the language of inspiration and creation, that privileges one culture as the paradigm of civilization. Like it or not, even translation as a linguistic transmission, in its most literal, conventional, and narrow sense, cannot do away with the unevenness of languages—this time not a hierarchy of the original language versus the target language, but of a dominant language vis-á-vis a minor language. Especially in a colonial context in which one language is considered to be more conceptually sophisticated to produce knowledge, and thus ontologically superior to those “barbarian” tongues, the authority and authenticity are not necessarily linked to the original as the placeholder of the norm, but rather shift to the Language of the Master, no matter whether it is the original or the translation. Consequently, any text not written in that Language is essentially a copy, whose meaning and significance awaits to be realized and legitimized in the Language through the practice of translation.

The Language: It can be English, without which modernity and globalization would have seemed unlikely to happen. It can be French that the “French” people speak, which has a white face as its source of emission. The imperialist Language takes on many forms, depending on the specific setting; yet it never fails to create a proliferation of enunciation and a vortex of discourse, sucking in and erasing what seems alien, heterogeneous, and incompatible to the horizon that the Language can envision. A cogent example can be found in the cultural theorist Ien Ang’s essay “On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic Identification and Postmodern Ethnicity” (2001). Ang began the essay with an anecdotal reflection on her encounter with Lan-lan, a tourist guide from Beijing, who, according to Ang, “spoke English in a way that revealed a ‘typically Chinese’ commitment to learn: eager, diligent, studious” (21). Commenting on Lan-lan’s criticism of the Chinese government, Ang wrote,

She told us these things so insistently, apparently convinced that it was what we wanted to hear. In other words, in her own way she did what she was officially supposed to do: serving up what she deemed to be the most favourable image of China to significant others—that is, Westerners.

But at the same time it was clear that she spoke as a Chinese. She would typically begin her sentences with “We Chinese …” or “Here in China we …” […] It was almost painful for me to see how Lan-lan’s attempt to promote ‘China’ could only be accomplished by surrendering to the rhetorical perspective of the Western other. It was not the content of the criticism she expounded that I was concerned about. What upset me was the way in which it seemed necessary for Lan-lan to take up a defensive position, a position in need of constant self-explanation, in relation to a West that can luxuriate in its own taken-for-granted superiority.

(22)

Guiding a group that “consisted mainly of white, Western tourists” (21), Lan-lan “naturally” took up the role of a translator. The duality implicit in Lan-lan’s self-positioning, which, as Ang suggested, amplified the striking (in)consistency of being a disciple and a betrayer all at once, was unsettling. Judged from the habit of beginning her sentences with “We Chinese,” Lan-lan seemed to embrace the subjective position entailed by her national and cultural identity. Yet, when read together with the content of her words, such a mode of address functioned only as a grammatical occupation. The real subject of enunciation was not Lan-lan as a Chinese, who used English to translate for a group of Western tourists. Quite the opposite, it was the “innocent” presence of the Western audience that hollowed out the subjective position that “we Chinese …” was meant to indicate, and made it conform to an Englishized way of knowing and interpreting.

In other words, both the object and the method of translation related to Lan-lan’s narrative were overdetermined. As Ang observed, Lan-lan’s critique of the Chinese government being brutal and nondemocratic sounded too much like a cliché: After all, the ideological opposition of the democratic West versus the despotic Other was originally emitted from the Western mouth and therefore supposedly appealed to Western ears. At the same time, Lan-lan’s mode of criticism, too eager to delink the “good” and “lucid” Chinese people from the “bad” government—“The people know what happened last year in Tiananmen Square, and they don’t approve” (22)—nonetheless participated in the official propaganda to promote the image of the Chinese as modern and global citizens that value reason and critical thinking as equally highly as the Westerners. What troubled Ang particularly was the fact that Lan-lan’s Chineseness, along with her translation of China, only discovered their authenticity through the West being an ultimate frame of reference and the bearer of the norm. In this way, Lan-lan’s translation led nowhere but remained a defense that was implicated with the rhetoric of its adverse other and was thus always a betrayal of the self.

Ang’s experience epitomizes the moment that a postcolonial perspective has traversed the conventional terrain of translation theory, that the intersubjective interaction is by and large informed by the practice of translation. In this scenario, the linguistic encounter is anything but reciprocal. What happens, subsequently, is often an intense transformation of the language and society “under siege.” Because translation is inevitably conditioned by uneven distributions of knowledge and unequal political-economic situations, Rey Chow, in the concluding chapter of her book Primitive Passions (1995), argues that it often ends up abruptly in “the deadlock of the anthropological situation” (196). The process of translation, in this case, does not liberate the original and the translation, as Benjamin imagines, as “fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel” (260). Instead, it remains a one-way street—one-way, both in terms of the fixed route of movement and of the predetermined mode of representation. It is often the Western languages (English in particular) that generously reach out to “weaker” languages and societies, which are staticized in the process and pushed to the other end of translation, awaiting to be discovered, studied, and translated. What this path leads to is a narcissistic mirroring of what one is used to, an incarnation of what one desires to know, a protoimage of what one fears to be. Anything that obstructs this one-way “smooth” translation will be deemed untranslatable. In this case, untranslatability does not yield vision to nuances and complexities of the to-be-translated language and culture. Being untranslatable simply means reducing oneself to detestable chunks of alterity persistently drifting in the melting pot.

To translate, in this sense, is to consciously or unconsciously subject oneself to the grammar, syntax, and narrative imposed by the target audience. The problematics of self-translation will continue, even if the audience retreats to the background. The violence of the anthropological scenario is that it makes translation the only legitimate path to self-knowledge and the only perceivable mode of self-representation. In terms of the construction of community, the entanglement of self-translation with self-knowledge and self-representation is played out through Western source books and “self-confessional” literature about ethnicity. On the one hand, self-translation seems to translate non-Western peoples into the prey of the Western monologue, and thus leads inevitably to self-alienation. “[I]n order to fi...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction—Ethnic Resonances as Active Engagement
• Part I Reverberations and Dissonance in Performance and Dynamic Memorialization
• Part II Oscillations in Literature
• Part III Resounding Identities
• Notes on Contributors
• Index