7 results
88 - Translation
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
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- 22 April 2019, pp 259-261
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Summary
The relevance of translation to practices of travel and travel writing cannot be overstated. Travel takes place in what Michael Cronin (2000, 156) terms ‘a world of language(s)’ where ‘linguistic exposure to others’ is difficult to avoid and invariably requires the traveller to reword cultural systems encountered. Judith Johnston (2016 [2013], 2) also insists on a causal relationship between travel and translation, but for her translation triggers the journey rather than the other way around: ‘translation is another form of journey, literally the removal from one place or condition to another’. Anthony Pym's (2010, 152) conclusion is perhaps most emphatic and posits as elemental to human activity a mutually dependent relationship between movement and translation: ‘if nothing moved, there would be no need for translations’.
The centrality of translation to notions of movement, travel and transfer is also attested etymologically. The term derives from the Latin substantive translatio and the verb transferre. The former refers to the solemn transportation of religious relics from one location to another during the Middle Ages whereas the latter means to ‘move or to carry across’, a meaning that evokes the etymology of the Greek term for metaphor (Shannan Peckham 1998, 164). The notion of removal and transfer from one context to another is retained in the old French translater but this verb also understands translation as a specific interlingual process involving the transferral of meaning from a source to a target language.
Critical work on travel writing has not ignored the fundamental importance of translation. James Clifford (1997b), for example, identifies ‘translation’ as a key travelrelated term, as does Mary-Louise Pratt (2002) who sees its hermeneutical dimension repeated in travel's cross-cultural activities. However, although these influential critics explore how difference is deciphered and explained in familiar terms through writing practices that include travel accounts, translation as used by them and others is often divorced from language (Cronin 2000, 102). Instead, its metaphorical value is emphasized to account for external cultural and ideological processes that influence the (mis)representations of a source culture to a target culture.
Travel writing's collusion with the European imperial project exposes an enduringly contradictory role played by linguistic translation that may explain a reluctance to engage in any systematic way with language encounter in the context of travel writing and its scholarship.
69 - Primitivism
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
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- 22 April 2019, pp 202-204
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Primitivism has a long history. Its beginnings as a distinctive discourse, however, are more widely associated with early-modern encounters between European explorers and the New World. As this early era of exploration developed into a sustained period of global conquest and colonization, primitivist figures began to feature heavily in textual and visual representations of the non-European Other. The term ‘primitivism’ itself is derived from the Latin primitivus, meaning the first or earliest of its kind. As used or evoked by writers from the sixteenth century and beyond, primitivism broadly denotes humankind in a ‘wild’, ‘savage’, ‘unrefined’ or ‘natural’ state. However, the tensions underlying these understandings suggest a much wider field of signification. For if primitivism connotes notions of ‘purity’, ‘innocence’ and ‘authenticity’, it also suggests anxieties about the ‘wild’, the ‘savage’ and the ‘unnatural’. Ultimately, however, primitivism is as much about the exportation of a Western cultural malaise as it is about representing the culturally primitive other. As Adam Kuper (2005, 23) explains, ‘[T] hey define us, as we define them.’
A key text for identifying critical pathways into the paradoxical discourses of primitivism is Michel de Montaigne's late sixteenth-century essay, ‘On the Cannibals’. Honed in reaction to textual accounts of journeys to the New World, Montaigne's insights reveal in the first instance the role travel writing played in disseminating primitivism's salient meanings. Features of early modern accounts resonate in Montaigne's (1991, 233) description of people he has not encountered yet who he confidently asserts have ‘no acquaintance with writing, no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior […] no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy’.
This initial eulogization of a society unencumbered by ‘civilization’ fits with uses of the ‘Noble Savage’, a figure into which much of primitivism's imaginary is condensed in the centuries that follow. Ter Ellingson (2001) demonstrates the predominance of this archetype in seventeenth-century French travel accounts depicting North American Indians, and traces its emergence to Marc Lescarbot's analysis of ‘savage’ society published in his 1609 compendium of travel writing, Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Fiction further popularized the fecund figure of the Noble Savage who, alongside related primitivist tropes of unspoiled societies and authentic selves, becomes central to many of the philosophical and sentimental writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Todorov 1989).
29 - Ethnicity
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
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- 22 April 2019, pp 84-86
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‘Ethnicity’ is a fluid concept that interconnects in complex ways with other forms of social identification. It refers to notions of belonging based on shifting combinations of common geographical origins and cultural traditions. Etymologically, the term derives from the Greek ethnos. Originally, ethnos denoted large groups of animals or insects and, by metaphorical association, invading armies ‘where great size, amorphous structure, and threatening mobility’ were emphasized (Tonkin et al. 1996, 19). This early use evolved to describe groups of people with a shared identity yet who were always also ‘other’, usually in an inferior way. By the mid-nineteenth century, ethnos had come to be understood as a band of people, or tribe, with shared characteristics. As a substantive, the term did not impose itself in English, largely because the idea of ‘race’ made it redundant. However, by the earliest dictionary appearance of ‘ethnicity’ in 1972 (Oxford English Dictionary), sociologists were signalling the term's value both as a means of breaking with the biological mis/understandings of ‘race’ and offering a response to the identity formations of postcolonial migration. While the extent to which these objectives have been achieved remains a matter of debate, ‘ethnicity’ is now routinely deployed to foreground the cultural bases of identity but also to stress subjective interpretations of such factors by those who claim an ethnic identity and those who attribute it.
How and why does ‘ethnicity’ matter to critical understandings of travel writing and vice versa? At the most basic level, travelling lifestyles serve as the fundamental basis on which the ethnic identification of nomadic groups around the worldis constructed. Metaphors of nomadism in critical language have tended to obscure these connections between travel and ethnicity. However, in contesting the hegemony of static and bounded ways of thinking, such metaphorical usage can evoke the manner in which the mobility of nomadic ethnicities has been perceived as ‘threatening’ rather than enriching. On the other hand, the apparently detached reporting of the traveller has frequently been valued for his/her ‘outsider’ perspective on the connections between fixed, instrumentalist understandings of ethnicity and violent conflict (see Moffat 2012).
Assumptions regarding the traveller's ‘neutrality’ can often be based on the understanding of this figure as a ‘non-ethnically’ marked observer of the ‘ethnically marked’ Other.
16 - Coevalness
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 45-47
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Coevalness is a temporal concept that refers to the existence or origins of people and objects in the same time. The term has become associated with anthropology and the retooling of that field's conceptual vocabulary since the 1960s. Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other (1983) is the seminal work on this subject. In it, Fabian highlights a key paradox, or ‘schizogenic use of Time’ (21), framing the practice of anthropology. On the one hand, dialogue between anthropologists and their referents clearly constitutes ‘coeval research’ (60) as it takes place in contemporaneous, shared time. On the other, theoretical interpretations of that dialogue in written reports and anthropological discourse more widely are said to be allochronic because they routinely situate anthropology's objects of study in another time. This temporal distancing is achieved by presenting as the norm the West's ‘present’ and its conception of evolutionary time. In this way coevalness is denied to the Other. Instead, their time is portrayed as ‘cyclical rather than linear, qualitative rather than quantitative […] encapsulated in history rather than constituting the motor of history, […] oriented to stability rather than change’ (Adam 1994, 504). As a result, the invariably ‘traditional’, ‘uncivilized’, ‘premodern’ Other lags behind her/his Western counterpart culturally, morally and intellectually.
As a fundamental element in the construction of the Other, the ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983, 35) is key to making sense of travel writing. It serves as a reminder in the first instance that travel writing textualizes a spatiotemporal practice: to travel is to move across space and time, but also, frequently, travel has meant bearing witness to the otherness of place and time. The denial of coevalness is particularly evident in colonial travel writing (see colonialism). It is described although not conceptualized in the same way by Edward Said (1995 [1978], 72) when he highlights the ‘timeless eternal’ tense employed in Orientalist writing (see orientalism). Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 64) identifies it explicitly in her reading of John Barrow's 1801 ethnographic portrait of the South African! Kung people. So too does Robert M. Burroughs (2010) in his analysis of repeated references to the ‘barbarity’ of indigenous peoples by European travellers to the Congo during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practice is not, however, limited to Western portrayals of non-Western cultures.
5 - Anthropology
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
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- 22 April 2019, pp 13-15
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As suggested by its Greek roots (anthropos meaning humankind; logia meaning ‘study’ or ‘science’ of), ‘anthropology’ refers to the broad disciplinary study of peoples and cultures. Anthropology as a subject of intellectual curiosity coincides with the earliest encounters of European travellers and explorers with cultural difference (see, e.g., The Histories of Herodotus). As anthropological inquiry developed, its purview remained overwhelmingly non-Western peoples, with the explanation of ‘other’ cultures serving as its primary intellectual motor. In Europe, the amateur beginnings of ‘anthropology’ were formalized during the second half of the nineteenth century with the formation of learned societies such as the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (1859), the Anthropological Society of London (1863) and the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft (1869). By the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology had achieved status as a distinguished field of scientific inquiry. Since then anthropology's varied institutional histories have seen it branch in directions rooted in both the sciences and the humanities. It is often used interchangeably with ethnography, although the latter term describes more precisely the modes of writing used to describe cultural difference.
Anthropology is significant to travel writing for a number of reasons. First, from the late 1960s critical examination of the discipline's historical development began to signal anthropology's complicity with the imperial project and its contribution to the construction of a colonial and frequently racist ‘knowledge’ of elsewhere (see Asad 1973; and colonialism). In his seminal Orientalism (1978), Edward Said subsequently lays bare convergences between the representational practices of anthropology and the ‘othering’ of nineteenth-century travel writing. Said demonstrates how ‘scientific’ and ‘aesthetic’ engagement with cultural difference resolved into a single authoritative discourse that dominated as it reified the ‘Oriental’ other (see orientalism). The mutually self-serving relationship between the aesthetics of travel writing and the ‘scientific’ practices of anthropology is further explored by Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 63), for whom the ‘ethnographic gesture’ is one of the ‘standard apparatuses’ travel writing deploys to produce authoritative knowledge about the other. This relationship is also highlighted by Johannes Fabian (2000, 7) who shows how, during the colonial exploration of Africa, ‘travel began to serve ethnography more directly to the extent that the latter became methodologized and professionalized’.
More recent methodological and conceptual developments in anthropology are also helpful for understanding certain critical approaches to travel and travel writing.
51 - Migration
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- By Aedín Ní Loingsigh, University of Stirling.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 148-150
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From the Latin verb migrare, meaning ‘to move from one place to another’, migration is self-evidently a correlative of travel. Broadly speaking, the term denotes the journeys undertaken by humans, or other species, to live elsewhere either temporarily or permanently. Migration is also recognized as having had a singularly transformative influence on places, cultures and identities throughout human history. Within the field of travel writing and its study, the potential of migration to alter the frames of reference used for defining the genre is also considerable. Nonetheless, migration's competing meanings and critical uses mean that accounting for the journeys it encompasses is not straightforward. Caught between the liberating cultural contribution of the cosmopolitan migrant and the unsettling ‘fluidity of the masses’ that must be controlled (Urry 2000, 27), migration as concept and practice points to the open-ended development of travel writing at the same time as it signals the need to reject its givenness.
Migration understood as a transformative and ultimately enabling travel practice is evidenced most clearly in the widespread appeal of its metaphoricity within specific strands of critical discourse. In the later decades of the twentieth century, metaphorical uses of migration – and the recurrence of figures and tropes such as the nomad (see nomadism), the vagabond, exile, displacement, homelessness, borders – were increasingly used to conceptualize the emergent identities of a globalized world and the epistemic transformations of Western critical thought. A migrant intelligentsia that understood theorization as a product of its own mobility and displacement spearheaded much of this development. For example, Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1994, 9) argues that ‘the travelling self is both […] the self that moves physically from one place to another […] and the self that embarks on an undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad’. ‘Migrants’ are presented by Homi Bhabha (1990, 315) as part of the ‘wandering peoples who […] are the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation [and] makes it unheimlich’. And Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) suggests that the borders negotiated by migrants are not just geographical spaces but embodied spaces that inflict unhealable wounds.
Although the enabling dual (at least) perspective of these cultural migrants has been welcomed as a challenge to fixed positions, it has also been questioned for its failure to differentiate sufficiently between the material and the metaphorical.
Translation and the professional selves of Mercer Cook
- Aedín Ní Loingsigh
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- Journal:
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 81 / Issue 3 / October 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 November 2018, pp. 459-474
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- October 2018
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This article explores the ways in which African American Mercer Cook's translation practice reflects complex overlaps between his professional/personal selves and an ideological backdrop that encompasses black internationalism, US race struggles and mid-twentieth-century diplomatic relations with Africa. A first section explores how Cook, a university professor of French, uses what he terms the “close-to-home” value of translation in order to expose his African American students to what has been written about them in French. At the same time, translation is seen by him as essential to building a “shared elsewhere” where his students can reflect on their place within a black world that is neither nation-bound nor monolingual. A second section examines the way in which Cook's translation practice is inflected by his role as US ambassador in francophone West Africa during the 1960s. In this context, the convergence of US civil rights with official US Cold War policy on postcolonial African states is key to understanding Cook's stance as a translator and the way in which he seeks diplomatically to propel his translations of L.S Senghor's texts towards a racially riven US readership.