“Thank you … . Facebook”: neocolonial practices of translation as self-Seduction

ABSTRACT

This article examines the diverging translations of an unnamed protester photographed several times throughout the early days of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. Using iconographic tracking, the paper argues that self-seductive translation is an important concept for critical cultural studies. Self-seductive translation targets neocolonial audiences with an identification chain that obscures the asymmetry of the neocolonial relationship. In the case of the unnamed protester, self-seductive translation encouraged US English speakers to identify themselves as equals with the imaged protester, where the now-equal relationship is delivered by tools and technology of the West.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• neocolonialism
• Egypt 2011
• protest
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Karima Khalil, Messages from Tahrir: Signs from Egypt’s Revolution (American University in Cairo Press, 2011), 127.

2 Heba Afify, “Activists Hope 25 January Protest Will Be Start of ‘Something Big,’” Al Masry Al Youm, January 24, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110228080642/http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/activists-25-january-protest-be-start-something-big.

3 Engy Abdelkader, “From Aisha Bint Abu Bakr to Asmaa Mahfouz: The Legacy of Muslim Women in Populist Revolutions Part I,” Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law 16 (2011): 53–68.

4 Khaled Dabbour, “The Linguistic Landscape of Tahrir Square Protest Signs and Egyptian National Identity,” Studies in Linguistics and Literature 1, no. 2 (2017): 142–61.

5 Melissa Bell, “BlogPost: Egypt Protests ‘Day of Departure’ Day Eleven,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110207194544/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2011/02/egypt_protests_day_eleven.html.

6 Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 16.

7 Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).

8 Jeremy M Sharp, “Egypt in Transition,” Congressional Research Services, https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4e5c81712.pdf; Tom Cohen, “U.S. Navigates Carefully between Supporting Mubarak, Democratic Ideals,” CNN.com, February 1, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/01/31/us.egypt.response/index.html.

9 Habibul Haque Khondker, “Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring,” Globalizations 8, no. 5 (2011): 675–9.

10 The only exception I have been able to locate: Laura Gribbon and Sarah Hawas, “Signs and Signifiers: Visual Translations of Revolt,” in Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, ed. Samia Mehrez (Cairo: American University Cairo Press, 2012), 103–42.

11 Stacey K. Sowards, “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 477–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2019.1669891.

12 Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2014).

13 Annie Brisset, “Cultural Perspectives on Translation,” International Social Science Journal 61, no. 199 (March 2010): 69–81, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2451.2010.01748.x.

14 Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 20.

15 Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Oakland: University of California Press, 1991).

16 G. J. V. Prasad, “Writing Translation: The Strange Case of the Indian English Novel,” in Post-Colonial Translation. Theory and Practice, eds. Susan Bassnet and Harish Trivedi (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1999), 41–57.

17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Destabilizing Theory, eds. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 177–200.

18 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Die Philosophin 14, no. 27 (2003): 42–58.

19 Robinson, Translation and Empire, 10.

20 Niranjana, Siting Translation, 163.

21 Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 63.

22 Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3.

23 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 23.

24 Ibid., 18.

25 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 46. All authors included in this section are used, referenced, and intermixed in Tageldin’s original argument. I am sensitive to critiques of recentering largely European philosophers in discussions of postcolonialism. However, Tageldin’s intermixing and critique while building on these insights using postcolonial scholarship warrants their inclusion.

26 Tageldin, Disarming Words, 21.

27 Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2013), 136.

28 Yukio Tsuda, “English Hegemony and English Divide,” China Media Research 4, no. 1 (January 2008): 47.

29 Jodi Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (2003): 102. For an account of unequal participation see: Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess, “The Arab Spring and Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 871–98.

30 Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Bedford: Panaf, 1974). Thomas Gladwin and Ahmad Saidin, Slaves of the White Myth: The Psychology of Neocolonialism (London: Humanities Press, 1980).

31 Raka Shome, “Postcolonial or Neocolonial? Defining the Grounds of Research in Global Communication Studies: Caught in the Term ‘Post-Colonial’: Why the ‘Post-Colonial’ Still Matters,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 2 (1998): 203–12. For an example of a poor argument for favoring neocolonialism over postcolonialism see: Celeste Michelle Condit and Anandam P. Kavoori, “Postcolonial or Neocolonial? Defining the Grounds of Research in Global Communication Studies: Getting Past the Latest ‘Post’: Assessing the Term ‘Post-Colonial,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15, no. 2 (1998): 195–203.

32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1 (1991): 222–3.

33 Kent Ono, Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 2.

34 Spivak, “Neocolonialism,” 222.

35 Sharp, “Egypt in Transition,”

36 See: Linda Martín Alcoff, The Problem of Speaking for Others (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2008), 7.

37 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Psychology Press, 1992), 115.

38 Christina R. Foust and Kate Drazner Hoyt, “Social Movement 2.0: Integrating and Assessing Scholarship on Social Media and Movement,” Review of Communication 18, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 37–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2017.1411970, 39.

39 Damien Pfister, “Theorizing Digital Rhetoric,” in The Terms of Technoliberalism, eds. Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2017), 37, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315203645-4.

40 Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2.

41 Srdjan Vučetić, “The Logics of Culture in the Anglosphere,” in Culture and External Relations, eds. Jozef Bàtora and Monika Mokre (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2011), 49.

42 Randa Aboubakr’s work distinguishes between acknowledging the role of social media in the Revolution and lapsing into techno-saviorism. See: “The Role of New Media in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011: Visuality as an Agent of Change,” in Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook, eds. Walid El Hamamsy, and Mounira Soliman (Oxfordshire: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 231–245.

43 Randa Abou-bakr, “New Directions of Internet Activism in Egypt,” Communications 38, no. 3 (2013): 251. https://doi.org/10.1515/COMMUN-2013-0015.

44 Ahlam Muhtaseb, “US Media Darlings: Arab and Muslim Women Activists, Exceptionalism and the ‘Rescue Narrative,’” Arab Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1/2 (2020): 7–24, https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.42.1-2.0007.

45 Muhtaseb, “US Media Darling,” 11.

46 Mohamed Ben Moussa, “Online Mobilization in Times of Conflict: A Framing-Analysis Perspective,” Arab and Media Society no. 17 (2013): 1–24; Wiebke Lamer, “Twitter and Tyrants: New Media and Its Effects on Sovereignty in the Middle East,” Arab Media and Society 16 (2012): 1–22.

47 Azeez, Govand Khalid, “The Oriental Rebel in Western History,” Arab Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2015): 244–63.

48 Erin A. Snider, “US Democracy Aid and the Authoritarian State: Evidence from Egypt and Morocco,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2018): 801.

49 Snider, “US Democracy Aid,” 803.

50 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric, 86–87.

51 Cara A. Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph and the Archive,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 211.

52 Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 43–45.

53 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87.

54 Lisa Anderson, “Demystifying the Arab Spring: Parsing the Differences between Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3 (2011): 2–7.

55 Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013), 1–15.

56 Al Jazeera, “Timeline: Egypt’s Revolution,” Al Jazeera, February 12, 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112515334871490.html.

57 Lloyd C. Gardner, The Road to Tahrir Square: Egypt and the United States from the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak (New York City: New Press, 2011), ix.

58 Ibid, 1–5.

59 Cohen, “US Navigates.”

60 Bell, “Egypt Protests.”

61 Catherine Smith, “Richard Engel Tweets Photo Of Egyptian Protesters With ‘Thank You Facebook’ Sign,” Huffington Post, February 4, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20221201045743/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/egypt-protesters-thank-you-facebook_n_818745.

62 Monash, “Al Jazeera: Thank You Al-Jazeera Flickr,” www.flickr.com/photos/89031137@N00/5420543191/in/photostream/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200108155114/https://www.flickr.com/photos/89031137@N00/5420543191/in/photostream/ (accessed August 22, 2020). Said Aldàn D’ea’ea, “Alejzarh: Jewernalasem Jeref, bh Pehenaa Aneqlab,” Parsine. https://web.archive.org/web/20120428011956/https://www.parsine.com/fa/news/34253/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%DB%8C%D8%B1%D9%87-%DA%98%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%B3%D9%85-%DA%98%D8%B1%D9%81-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D9%BE%D9%87%D9%86%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%A8.

63 Bell, “Egypt Protests.”

64 Vaidhyanathan, Anti-Social Media, 2. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (Westminster: Penguin London, 2006).

65 Khalil, Messages from Tahrir, 127.

66 See: Abou-bakr, “New Directions of Internet Activism in Egypt,” 250–1.

67 Smith, “Richard Engel Tweets.”

68 Smith, “Richard Engel Tweets.” On the Washington Blog FxFloyd on February 4th notes, “The cardboard sign with ‘FACEBOOK’ written in English actually says ‘Thank you youth of Egypt’ in Arabic. And in the picture with ‘Facebook’ written in white spray paint, the Arabic says ‘Al Jazeera.’”

69 ATLien, “Social Media Mania Sparks First Baby Named ‘Facebook,’” Straight From The A [SFTA] – Atlanta Entertainment Industry Gossip & News (blog), February 22, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20211128120243/https://straightfromthea.com/2011/02/22/social-media-mania-sparks-first-baby-named-facebook/.

70 Matt Stopera, “The 30 Craziest Facebook Stories of 2011,” Buzzfeed, December 21, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20111222112831/https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-craziest-facebook-stories-of-2011.

71 Stopera, “The 30 Craziest.”

72 Emma Rathbone, “Can Social Networking Spur a Revolution?,” Virgina Magazine, March 15, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20201202225533/https://uvamagazine.org/articles/can_social_networking_cause_revolution.

73 Rathbone, “Can Social Networking.”

74 Shahira Fahmy, “Picturing Afghan Women: A Content Analysis of AP Wire Photographs during the Taliban Regime and after the Fall of the Taliban Regime,” Gazette 66, no. 2 (2004): 111.

75 See: Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

76 Lawrence Venuti, “Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication in English,” Textual Practice 7, no. 2 (1993): 209. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502369308582166.

77 Nicole Tara Allen, “Publicizing Pussy Riot: Translating (Inter)(Trans) National Memories on the Global Memoryscape,” Southern Communication Journal 83, no. 3 (2018): 197–8.

78 Ben Conisbee Baer, “What Is Special about Postcolonial Translation?” in A Companion to Translation Studies, eds. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014), 231–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118613504.ch17.

79 Monash, “Al Jazeera.”

80 Phillip Seib, “U.S. Public Diplomacy and the New Egypt,” USC Annenberg: CPD Blog, February 14, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20160829070754/https://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/us-public-diplomacy-and-new-egypt.

81 Miriyam Aouragh and Anne Alexander, “The Egyptian Experience: Sense and Nonsense of the Internet Revolution,” International Journal of Communication 5 (2011): 1347–8.

82 Nabil Sultan, “Al Jazeera: Reflection on the Arab Spring,” Journal of Arabian Studies 3, no. 2 (2013): 249.

83 Some scholarly research has complicated the optimistic view of Al Jazeera as independent owing to its positive coverage of Qatari political stances especially as they related to the Qatari-Saudi conflict. See: Tal Samuel-Azran, “Al Jazeera, Qatar, and the New Tactics in State-Sponsored Media Diplomacy,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 9 (2013): 1293–311.

84 Sultan, “Al Jazeera,” 253.

85 Ibid., 254.

86 Sowards,“ #RhetoricIsSoEnglishOnly,” 478.

87 Sowards in her 2019 essay calls specific attention to reflections on translation by scholars like Catalina de Onís, “‘Pa’ que tú lo sepas’: Experiences with co-presence in Puerto Rico,” in Text+Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, eds. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert G. Howard (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 101–16.

88 Charles Griffin, “Movement as Memory: Significant Form in Eyes on the Prize,” Communication Studies 54, no. 2 (2003): 208.

89 Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication (Includes Communication Reports) 54, no. 3 (1990): 274–89.

90 Meenakshi Gigi Durham, “Resignifying Alan Kurdi: News Photographs, Memes, and the Ethics of Embodied Vulnerability,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 3 (2018): 244–5.

91 Bruce Horner, Samantha NeCamp, and Christiane Donahue, “Toward a Multilingual Composition Scholarship: From English Only to a Translingual Norm,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 2 (2011): 269–300.

92 Randa Aboubakr, “Translation and the Struggle for Urban Symbolic Capital in Cairo,” in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City, ed. Tony King Lee (New York: Routledge, 2021), 263–77.

93 Nicole Doerr, “Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’: Multilingualism and the Case of the European Social Forum Process,” Social Movement Studies 8, no. 2 (2009): 149–65; Julie Boéri, “A Narrative Account of the Babels vs. Naumann Controversy,” The Translator 14, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 21–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2008.10799248.

94 Mona Baker, “Translation as an Alternative Space for Political Action,” Social Movement Studies 12, no. 1 (2013): 25.

95 Gwyneth Sutherlin, “A Voice in the Crowd: Broader Implications for Crowdsourcing Translation during Crisis,” Journal of Information Science 39, no. 3 (June 1, 2013): 397–409, https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512471593.

96 Sahar Khamis and Katherine Vaughn, “‘We Are All Khaled Said’: The Potentials and Limitations of Cyberactivism in Triggering Public Mobilization and Promoting Political Change,” Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 4, no. 2–3 (2012): 145–63.

97 Robert Mackey, “Updates on Day 6 of Egypt Protests,” The Lede New York Times Blog, https://web.archive.org/web/20191005113747/https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/latest-updates-on-day-6-of-egypt-protests/.

98 Brownlee, Democracy Prevention.

99 Sarah Childress, “Timeline: What’s Happened Since Egypt’s Revolution?,” Frontline, September 17, 2013, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-whats-happened-since-egypts-revolution/.

100 BBC News, “Egypt Profile,” BBC News, January 7, 2019, sec. Africa, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13315719.

101 Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2012).

102 Barak Ravid, “Netanyahu: Arab Spring Pushing Mideast Backward, Not Forward,” Haaretz.com, November 24, 2011, https://www.haaretz.com/2011-11-24/ty-article/netanyahu-arab-spring-pushing-mideast-backward-not-forward/0000017f-e2e9-d9aa-afff-fbf9bd190000.