Discussion Group: Thinking Translation and Resistance: Making and Refusing Meaning

Following our first creative-critical session on translation and activism in Michaelmas, OCCT Discussion Group co-convenors Georgie Fooks and Alyssa Ollivier-Tabukashvili invite you to consider translation in relation to resistance. This may include political resistance - in relation to activism - but also our role as translators in both making and refusing meaning, as well as considering what dominant knowledge systems or epistemologies may be reinforced or challenged in translation. With Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity in mind, resistance in translation may also be entangled with a refusal to translate.

In this session, we will consider a range of approaches to understand how resistance can inform our practice and understanding of translations. Resistance can entail a focus on our own political commitments, but to resist can also to be refuse or to reject. In translation, resistance may involve refusing to translate certain texts - developing Emily Apter's work on untranslatability - or may imply an openness to misunderstanding, confusion, and failure - to resisting the making of meaning. In queer theory, Jack Halberstam recodes failure, highlighting the potential of 'not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative [and] more surprising ways of being in the world'. To resist in translation may mean to refuse transparency or fluency in favour of opacity and friction.

The aim of this session is for all participants, whether translators or readers of translations, to understand the ways in which resistance - with its many possible meanings - may offer new modes to approach translation.

All are welcome - the reading suggested below is not compulsory, as key ideas will be summarised during the session, but may help you think through some of these questions in advance.

Suggested materials to explore before the session - choose what interests you:

• Édouard Glissant, and Betsy Wing (translator), 'Transparency and Opacity'. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
• Khairani Barokka, 'Right to Access, Right of Refusal: Translation of/as Absence, Sanctuary, Weapon'. Violent Phenomena. London: Tilted Axis, 2022.
• Mona Baker, 'Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action'. Social movement studies, vol. 12, 2013. Online on Solo.
• B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillett, 'Introduction'. Queer in Translation. New York: Routledge, 2017. Online on Solo.
• Jack Halberstam, 'Introduction: Low Theory'. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Online on Solo.
• Emily S. Apter. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Online on Solo.