“This show does not represent the views of the artists”: Translation, non-translation, activism and access in the Homeland graffiti hack

ABSTRACT

The October 2015 hack of the television show Homeland by three graffiti artists hired by the production company is a fascinating case of linguistic and translational activism. This article examines the event from several perspectives in translation studies, exploring how the brief creates space for the artists’ action as well as how their work intersects with notions of narrative irony, linguistic and cultural hospitality and hijacking, media access, and authenticity. The case reveals how the work of the artists challenges the narrative spaces of the show while still fulfilling the given task. It shows the power of linguistic access, and illustrates how forms of access can be manipulated by activists in order to achieve wider dissemination. The analysis intersects with certain discourses on intersemiotic translations and multimodal texts, and considers the relationship between writing as verbal expression and writing as visual image.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• intersemiotic
• multimodality
• irony
• hospitality
• access

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the artists, and particularly to Caram Kapp, for their willingness to discuss their work with me. Thanks also to Dr Dalia Mostafa and Huda Yehya for their help with the Arabic graffiti texts, and to Dr Luis Pérez-González for reading a draft and offering his comments.

Note on contributor

Anna Strowe is a lecturer in translation and interpreting studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include translation theory, media studies and medieval literature. She completed her PhD at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in comparative literature, and has a background in English and Italian early modern literature. Her current research focuses on translation studies and book history, but she has published on early modern printing, power and translation, and translation theory pedagogy as well.

ORCiD

Anna Strowe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9749-5921

Notes

1. See Baker (2014, 15) on the expansion of translation to “a wide range of activities and products that do not necessarily involve an identifiable relationship with a discrete source text” and Desjardins (2008) on forms of translation between visual and verbal mediums in newscasting.

2. These points are also noted by a number of articles online about the event, including Mulder and Bsumek (2015).

3. On hijacking as a feminist activist translation strategy, see, in the first instance, von Flotow (1991, 78–80).

4. The notion of prepositions as indeterminate terms comes from Ferguson (2015, 122), who traces it to John Locke’s idea “that knowledge ‘consists in prepositions.’ ”

5. Of course, it is possible that there were people on the production team who could read Arabic, who did see and understand the graffiti, but decided to keep silent about it. Their silence would in part ensure that the graffiti remained long enough to be transmitted outside its original physical sphere – the set itself – to the television audience. It would be almost impossible to prove the non-existence of such a person.

6. These levels of authenticity are playing out in what Genette ([1972] 1980, 234–237) calls “narrative metalepsis”: intrusions across narrative boundaries. See Pérez-González (2013, 16–18) and O’Sullivan (2011, 160–167) for examples of how similar forms of metalepsis can be created through creative titling in audiovisual texts.