Response

Loredana Polezzi's remarks on “a recurrent trope in critical writing” are meant as both an assessment and an intervention. Not content to note the mere fact of increasingly asserted links between translation and migration throughout the humanities and social sciences, she additionally points to the very “centrality of migration and of translation (as notions but also as practices) in contemporary society”. Beyond this and to her great credit, she calls for heightened analytical attention to specific forms of entanglement “interweaving” migration and translation in relevant domains of culture, society, politics and analytical practice itself. Her primary points of reference are social structures in contemporary life and representational modalities for capturing operative relations between individuals and communities, institutions and politics, rights and borders, public spheres and private spaces, language and power, agential autonomy and biopolitical domination. Such large claims are difficult to sustain in a short position paper, but entail many useful provocations for advancing critical thought about the conjoined figuration of translation and migration in the twenty-first century.

For Polezzi, a recurring linkage between translation and migration becomes a site “where crucial stakes are placed and played out” over collective futures. This too is much to her credit, and we should follow suit by asking what happens to our understanding of “crucial stakes” if we take this allusion to futurity seriously. To what extent do critical accounts of a crucial “interweaving” of migration and translation today remain beholden to representational modalities of times in which we perhaps no longer live, and to what extent do critical accounts of such entanglements allow for other forms of perception and representation, forms more adequate to worlds as they are changing now? These questions are scalar rather than dichotomous in nature. I offer them as a complement to Polezzi's interventions inasmuch as she underscores a need for critical thought to recognize how multivalent contemporary experiences of migration and practices of multilingualism increasingly “defy any rigid association between state, language, identity and the apportioning of rights”.

Polezzi takes a two-pronged approach to analyzing the contemporary nexus of translation and migration as fundamentally different from the past in both social and representational terms. Both emphases pivot on her claim that “while the political nature of language is certainly not exclusive to migration scenarios, migration enhances its visibility”. First, she argues that keener analytical attention to “a wider range of practices” at the experiential crossroads of translation and migration will yield alternatives to mostly “negative models of translation seen as a form of control over linguistic heterogeneity”. Second, she suggests in a largely Foucauldian vein that “debunking the myth of monolingualism as norm” will allow critical thought to keep pace with the “pervasive presence of polylingualism” in social life today.

Methodological problems arise, in my view, when the intended interventions remain cast – without question – in a language of personhood. Recourse to this representational modality makes excellent if limited sense to the degree that Polezzi relates migration in translation and translation in migration to “the dehumanizing nature of contemporary power” and “our understanding of being ‘human’”. Her analytical vocabulary of agency, experience, witnessing and “self-translation” speaks to her explicit concerns with the politics and ethics of translation's encounter with migration and her implicit notion of human rights in everyday life. For this reason Polezzi pointedly ties her interventionist account of a crucial conjunction of translation and migration to a rhetoric of personhood. “Migration, if we consider it from the perspective of translation”, she writes, “reminds us that it is not only texts that travel, but also people. This is perhaps the key fact for a translation studies approach to migration, and the one which can have the greatest impact on how we conceptualize both the discipline and the work of translation”.

There lies the crux of a problem. If the linkage between migration and translation must be considered central to analyses of contemporary society, how can anthropomorphism as a representational modality of critical thought also be made accountable for abstract structures of experience, power, economics, labor, communication, language, culture, law and so on? Can anthropomorphism – as a mode of analysis as well as representation – ever suffice to capture the “crucial stakes” of contemporary developments and collective futures signaled by the entanglement of translation and migration? In migration studies and translation studies, other scholars have paved our way for critical reflection on precisely this problem from various perspectives. Most of them require some conceptual distancing from a rhetoric of personhood and attendant assumptions of embodied individualism. For example, as I discuss in The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (2005), Saskia Sassen forges a language of “emblematic subjects” rather than human persons in order to account for structural processes and political valences of economic transformation and global demographics around 2000. In her seminal study Globalization and Its Discontents (1998) and subsequent publications, she does so because an anthropomorphic rhetoric of migration experience and identity politics in her view obscures the very processes of social transformation shaping transnational migration in new global economies, including those that play out in old but changing nation-states (see also Sassen's elaborations on “migration as embedded process”, 2010).

From a perspective that, like Polezzi's, aims to link the social and the literary in some key ways, Rey Chow offers a radical critique of philosophical precepts of individualism in her study of migration, ethnicity, difference and protest in Western forms of late-capitalist modernity (2002). She argues forcefully against “coercive mimeticism” of human life as a representational modality that ultimately obscures abstract structures of capitalist interpellation and commodification, especially where ethnic and gendered identities are concerned. According to Chow, these anthropomorphic figures of identity index contemporary social forms of capitalist alienation, not the authentic forms of personhood that philosophical notions of human subjects as autonomous individuals entail. Chow therefore questions rather than applauds a prevalent taste for autobiographical experience and testimonial sincerity in migration literature and ethnic criticism, regarding them as marketing phenomena. Polezzi too resists “any immediate mimetic intent aimed at reproducing the everyday life of the migrant”, yet she nonetheless invokes translation in her positive sense as a “testimonial vocation”, an authentic “act of witnessing” that speaks back to “the dehumanizing nature of contemporary power”. To ask whether Chow's and Polezzi's perspectives are compatible is to ask what mimetic forms and representational modalities would be required to analyze or even describe social changes at the crossroads of migration and translation in global worlds today.

In related veins, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature elaborates several case studies of literary analysis drawn from the effects of Turkish migration on changing textual and extra-textual worlds on the cusp of the twenty-first century in Europe. These studies of migration's narrative entanglements with other social and cultural phenomena – in creative fiction by authors such as Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Şenocak and Feridun Zaimoğlu – emphatically demonstrate (with occasional attention to translation) how discourses of personhood and identity can stymie cognition of what is genuinely innovative in both “touching tales” of migration and social life in Germany around 2000. Borrowing a term from Seyla Benhabib's political theory of evolving forms of membership in contemporary transnational societies, I argue for this reason in The Turkish Turn in favor of a “disaggregated” approach to literary interventions in social life where migration figures crucially (see especially Benhabib 2002, 161; Adelson 2005, 7–8). Forms of identity politics familiar to us from public debates about inclusion and exclusion sometimes render migration literature less rather than more intelligible as a narrative and social innovation.

Polezzi's remarks on the interweaving of migration and translation are somewhat ambivalent on the subjects of rhetorical tropes and literary writing, despite a focal interest in “translation as a linguistic activity” and “language practices connected to migration”. Although she acknowledges the polysemia of migration and translation alike and wisely asks us to consider “a wider range of [language] practices” informing contemporary society, she criticizes “the increasingly metaphorical” usage of the words translation and migration, subsequently offering a personalized figure of migration as a real social “antidote for too metaphorical a use of the idea of translation”. These arguments inform her notion of “migrants as agents of translation” and her identification of human rather than mere textual migration as “the key fact for a translation studies approach to migration”. But what status does or should literary language have in Polezzi's call for heightened attention to specific forms of entanglement linking migration and translation in crucial ways today? Appearing to dismiss literary writing in the first section of her position paper, she turns favorably in its middle section to “migrant writing” and “textual representation as a form of creative expression” particularly well suited to indexing new approaches to translation, polylingualism and contemporary society as she understands them. Yet literature pivoting on migration is defined here largely as an experiential project of authorial expression and personalized witnessing, however creative, and the final section of the paper seems to reassert a rather stark dichotomy between “the realm of representation” and the domain of “everyday life”. If migration literature in a broader sense can make certain social transformations intelligible or even possible on the threshold of a new era, as I argue in The Turkish Turn, and if it does so through particular engagements with literary language, in what ways might we understand Polezzi's attention to literary writing as necessary rather than merely supplemental and dispensable to her critical agenda?

Thinking about this question might entail revisiting the common interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “minor literature” (1986) as an expression of agency by persons and groups representing migrant minorities, and understanding their concept of “deterritorialization” as a radical intervention in literary language as such. This is not by any means a new insight on my part, but the reminder of deterritorialization's own polysemia in the reception of Deleuze and Guattari is perhaps especially useful given intensified attention to migration today. And if Polezzi's intelligently provocative account of the interweaving of migration and translation turns throughout on a trope of writing, a trope that she both observes and retains, does it suffice to dismiss the metaphorical in favor of the real when multifaceted “language practices” at the crossroads of translation and migration demand all the keen attention we can muster? Might we instead consider metaphorical and other rhetorical forms another site of real entanglement where migration and translation are concerned?

My final point concerns Polezzi's discussion of polylingualism, which figures centrally in her discussion of migrant writing as an instance of self-translation:

Most migrant writers who have chosen to write in an adopted language maintain strong traces of the presence of other tongues, other codes, and other cultures, creating forms of polylingual writing which are always already marked by the presence of translation and whose existence would not be possible without the intervention of translation processes. Their work incorporates translation as a constitutive element rather than as an accident that happens a posteriori.

The “always already” polylingual aspect that Polezzi associates with migrant writing in particular is shored up first through references to Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia and later, in the section on biopolitics, through recourse to Agamben's privileging of language and hence translation as, in her terms, “eminently political”. While Agamben's extreme generalizations on language and witnessing may not serve as reliable guides for the historical and political analyses Polezzi intends, I am more interested in introducing Yasemin Yildiz's recently published study, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012) at this juncture. Rather than taking “always already” polymorphic aspects of language and translation as her point of departure, in a series of fine-grained textual analyses Yildiz asks after specific forms that multilingualism takes in German literature and thought from Kafka to the present. Her capacious and differentiated approach to quite varied forms of multilingualism and translation, especially in relation to minorities and migration, suggests that the respective critical and affective stakes of multilingualism can be quite varied and equally specific as well. Yildiz additionally sheds considerable light on the historical emergence of European modernity's dominant paradigm of monolingualism, and on newly emergent forms of multilingualism today as historical in nature. For this reason her work resonates with Polezzi's stated interest in “debunking the myth of monolingualism” as a timeless norm, on the one hand, and demonstrates how contemporary forms of multilingualism do not merely displace monolingualism as a social or cultural practice but necessarily exist in ongoing tension with it, on the other. Whereas Polezzi prefers to conceptualize the contemporary nexus of translation and migration in terms of people rather than texts, Yildiz advances a text-based approach that helps us understand why and how the nexus of migration and multilingualism acquires historic significance at the turn of the twenty-first century as a cipher of local, global and alternative modernities. If a pervasive polylingualism becomes the new global norm in Polezzi's assessment, Beyond the Mother Tongue inspires us to ask – both with and against Polezzi – what specific forms of translation are mobilized when translation becomes entangled with migration. And if polylingualism always already attends translation, as Polezzi suggests, do we not also need to tease these concepts apart?