Embodied Translation: Dominant Discourse and Communication with Migrant Bodies-as-Text

Abstract

This article argues that intercultural communication scholars have unique contributions to offer discussions of migrant subject positions and subjectivity by focusing on communicative interactions between people. Specifically, the author proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how migrant bodies are translated in embodied contexts through dominant discursive meanings. The author argues that using a framework that demonstrates translations of foreign bodies-as-texts by actors who represent and enact the dominant discourse on immigration, such as law enforcement officials, provides a way to unpack the manner in which communication happens. Moreover, dissecting this embodied engagement also provides new ways to think about migrants that challenge dominant discursive constructions.

KEYTERMS:

• Chandler Round-up
• illegal alien
• immigration
• translation

I thank Dr. Carolyn Stroman, the blind reviewers, Dr. Sara McKinnon and Dr. Angelita Reyes for their help on this article.

Notes

I prefer the term migrant to immigrant as the former refers to “anyone who has crossed an international border” (Luibhéid, 2005, p. xi). This term refuses the distinctions between documented, undocumented, refugee and asylum seeker because these distinctions are often arbitrary and people traverse between them. Refusing these terms draws attention “to the ways that these distinctions function as technologies of normalization, discipline, and sanctioned dispossession” (p. xi).

This perspective on the body extends largely from semiotics, structuralism, and poststructuralism. Some are leery of considering the body as a text. Butler (1993) noted that a critique of these perspectives contends that reducing bodies to text or discourse ignores the materiality of bodies (p. 30). However, signification or text and materiality are inextricably bound into one another, with materiality requiring signification in order to be rendered legible or meaningful. This is not to say that materiality does not exist; it is simply to say that arguing for an a priori materiality reifies a binary opposition between language and materiality that simplifies a complex relationship between the two. Moreover, bodies are read and given subject status through signification.

The term scapes, spatial in its metaphor, is adapted from Arjun Appadurai's (1996) usage of different scapes to describe the dimensions of global cultural flows. The term scape helps one to see that all elements of a translative exchange may be occurring at the same time, thus subverting the temporal logic of linear models of communication.

The term discourse is used here in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault (1978) explained that discourses are the webs of cultural meanings that constitute subjects and produce/restrain the subject's agency. In other words, discourse includes words, rhetoric, literature, etc., but it is much broader and more elusive than language.

Importantly, scholars in semiotics talk about the process of semiosis that renders bodies meaningful. The problems of semiotics in relation to intercultural meaning making have been highlighted elsewhere (Spivak, 1993). Whereas translation shares some assumptions with semiotics, and some translation theories draw heavily on semiotics, I argue that translation as presented here offers an alternative to some of the cultural problematics of semiotics. Mainly, in emphasizing the rhetorical over the grammatic (in the Derridean sense), translation moves beyond the level of the sign, signifier and signified. Translation also provides a means with which to deal with the problems of foreign language (and body).