Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context

by Tejaswini Niranjana

Overview

The act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana maintains, is a political action. Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages. The traditional view of translation underwritten by Western philosophy helped colonialism to construct the exotic "other" as unchanging and outside history, and thus easier both to appropriate and control.

Scholars, administrators, and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the bounds of empire. Examining translations of Indian texts from the eighteenth century to the present, Niranjana urges post-colonial peoples to reconceive translation as a site for resistance and transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520911369
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Tejaswini Niranjana received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

1. Introduction: History in Translation
2. Representing Texts and Cultures:
Translation Studies and Ethnography
3· Allegory and the Critique of Historicism:
Reading Paul de Man
4· Politics and Poetics: De Man, Benjamin, and
the Task of the Translator
5· Deconstructing Translation and History:
Derrida on Benjamin
6. Translation as Disruption: Post-Structuralism
and the Post-Colonial Context

Bibliography
Index