Siting Translation

by Niranjana, Tejaswini

• ISBN13: 9780520074514
• ISBN10: 0520074513
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xi
Introduction: History in Translation	1	(46)
Representing Texts and Cultures: Translation Studies and Ethnography	47	(40)
Allegory and the Critique of Historicism: Reading Paul de Man	87	(23)
Politics and Poetics: De Man, Benjamin, and the Task of the Translator	110	(31)
Deconstructing Translation and History: Derrida on Benjamin	141	(22)
Translation as Disruption: Post-Structuralism and the Post-Colonial Context	163	(24)
Bibliography	187	(12)
Index	199