Comparative Literature Now: Translate and Rule by Hannah Scott Deuchar

Thursday 12 November 2026
18:15 - 19:45

Seminar Room 10, St Anne's College

Hannah Scott Deuchar (Queen Mary University of London)

In this instalment of our Comparative Literature Now series, join us for a conversation with Hannah Scott Deuchar on her new book, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, published with Stanford University Press (2026). 

This talk uses a single, telling case study to explore how translation has functioned simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the critique of imperial law, and a site for theorizing extra-legal justice and redress in the Arabic literary canon. The “Dinshaway Affair” was a 1906 multilingual court case in which four Egyptians were hanged and many more flogged or imprisoned in retaliation for the death of one British soldier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial and proto-nationalist activism. The talk puts the British trial documents in conversation with an Arabic novel about the event – not to adjudicate between them, but to ask how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of translation, justice, and reparation. In the archive, British officials use untranslatability to justify delay, absence, and fatal error. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī’s novel The Maiden of Dinshaway dramatizes this, turning on instances of miscommunication in the colonial courtroom. The novel’s own mis/translation of Victor Hugo ultimately rejects legal justice in favor of a violent, divine, disproportionate compassion (raḥma). The talk ends by asking how raḥma might inform reparative modes of comparison and translation in the context of ongoing colonial and settler-colonial violence today. 

Hannah Scott Deuchar is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Arabic and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, where she works on Middle Eastern literary and legal histories, translation theory and practice, and broader questions of technology, culture, and language. Her first monograph, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, was published with Stanford University Press in June 2026. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in IJMES, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and other journals and edited volumes, and has won the ACLA A. Owen Aldridge Prize. She is the holder of a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant and in 2025-6 was a Humboldt Research Fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.