Cultural translation, cosmopolitanism and the void

Abstract

Cultural translation is a key conceptual tool for understanding the effects of cross-cultural mixtures and transnational flows. It is also a necessary term for grasping the cosmopolitan forms of agency and collectivity. In this paper I explore the strengths and limits of models of cultural translation that focus on the creativity produced at the point of the encounter with difference. By reflecting on the example of the invention of a new visual language by Indigenous artists in Australia I also consider the need to expand the concept of creativity. This expanded definition of creativity would need to confront the paradoxical force of the void. Hence, I contend that the theoretical debates on cosmopolitanism and cultural translation should also be tied with an investigation into the critical force of the void in creativity.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• cultural translation
• void
• globalization
• creativity
• Aboriginal art

Notes

1. See also Hassan (1996), 316). I would like to thank Berndt Clavier for his discussion on Hassan.

2. Hassan has been rather late in his diagnosis of postmodernism. For over a decade literary and cultural theorists have been making such pronouncements. By the early 1990s Raymond Federman had declared that postmodernism was dead in literature as it had been engorged by economic globalization and stifled by “academic bickering” (Federman 1993, 123). At around the same time Hal Foster also claimed that the debates on postmodernism in the visual arts had been overtaken by “the return of the subject” (Foster 1996, 207)

3. There is a long-standing body of anthropological and cultural theory that has examined the process of cross-cultural transformation in the context of postcolonial and diaspora studies (see Papastergiadis 2000, 122–45). However, in the past decade the debate has widened considerably and the concept of translation has been used as the main trope for representing transformation in the fields of culture, society, economy, international relations and ethics. See Niranjana (1992); Tymoczko and Gentzler (2002); Cronin (2003, 2006); Berman and Wood (2005); Baker (2006).

4. Buden and Nowotny argue that the story of nation-building can be recast through the historical practice of cultural translation. They make a persuasive case that the construction of cultural belonging and cultural constituency precedes and frames the forms of political subjectivity. Access to the institutions of the nation state, therefore, do not rest on procedural claims towards political rights but follow from the specific context in which cultural membership is shaped (Buden and Nowotny 2009).

5. For if global culture merely referred to either an expanded cultural field of domination or new mechanisms for enhancing communication between centre and periphery, then it would be easily classified as a bigger, faster and more efficient version of imperial culture. However, the problem of conceiving of global culture as a “third space” is that while it is plausible as an abstraction, it becomes problematic in application. For instance, Alasdair MacIntyre, who quite rightly defined the third space of translation as one that is equidistant from particular languages and that is formed through the encounter with the incommensurability of other cultures, then promotes the bold claim that the dominant languages of Western modernity can serve this function. For an extended critique of MacIntyre see Papastergiadis (2000), 146–67). Judith Butler puts forward a similar argument about the constitutive act of cultural translation in relation to the possibility and limits of restaging the notion of universality (Butler 2000, 41).

6. See Derrida (1998), 25), where he describes the property of language as possessing a “structure of alienation without alienation”. In a later passage he prompts translators to “invent in your language if you can or want to hear mine […]. Compatriots of every country, translator-poets, rebel against patriotism! […] Each time I write a word, a word that I love and love to write; in the time of this word, at the instant of a single syllable, the song of this new International awakens in me” (ibid., 57).