Postcolonial untranslatability: Reading Achille Mbembe with Barbara Cassin

ABSTRACT

Barbara Cassin’s monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the “Untranslatable” (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe’s theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical “entanglements”, one of Mbembe’s key terms.

KEYWORDS:

• Untranslatable
• multilingual
• decolonization
• globalization
• nègre
• world

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Syrotinski

Michael Syrotinski is Marshal Professor of French at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on French philosophy, critical theory, contemporary 20th- and 21st-century French literature, and francophone African literature and philosophy within a postcolonial frame of reference. He is author of several books, including Singular Peformances: Reinscribing the Subject in Contemporary Francophone African Writing (2002) and Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (2007). He is one of the main translators of the anglophone edition of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014).