The question of translation, erasure and plurality at the borders of modernity / coloniality
Rolando Vazquez
This text circles round the question of translation in the light of the modernity coloniality debate. Translation is here addressed as a key element of hegemony as well as a possibility of emancipation. Translation designates the permeability, the movement at the borders of a given language, a given system of meaning and also of a given epistemic territory. We will explore two divergent processes that are revealed through the focus on translation. The first one, translation as erasure, speaks of the coloniality of translation; that is of the way in which translation performs a border keeping and expansion of modernity's epistemic territory. The second, translation as plurality, speaks of the movements and the thinking of the borders that are bringing to question the modernity / coloniality system of oppression. The fight against exclusion makes use of translation to define a territory of difference that is dialogical and plural, the borderlands.
In order to understand translation as erasure, translation is first seen as a technology through which the scriptural machine of modernity expands and demarcates its proper place, its territory. This operation of translation makes invisible all those who do not fit in the design of the dominant epistemic territory.
One foundation of this text is the perspective achieved in translation studies that have unveiled the political content of translation (Bassnett and Lefevere). We then extend the notion of translation beyond its practice in literature to speak of how it designates the border of a system of knowledge, of a epistemic territory, in particular that of modernity. For this we will use the idea of the scriptural machine (Michel de Certeau), in which modernity's movement of appropriation, colonization of the world by means of writing is made explicit. We will pursue this thought by drawing on examples from Latin America. The very writing of the history and geography of the 'discovered' territories meant the erasure of the local histories and geographies, furthermore, of the local notions of memory and land. Thus translation makes very explicit the coloniality of power (Mignolo) and the epistemic violence (Santos) that have enabled the expansion of modernity.
To address translation as plurality, we will look at how the movements that are fighting for visibility, for recognition around the world are challenging the borders of modernity/coloniality, by challenging its epistemic territory. Thus Boaventura de Sousa Santos speaks of the need of translation as a political strategy to attain mutual intelligibility, to build common grounds for the recognition of diversity, of other knowledges that have been erased or excluded from the hegemonic epistemic territory of modernity. Translation thus designates a territory of difference, of plurality and inter-cultural dialogue (Fornet-Betancourt). We will also look at the notion of border thinking (Anzaldua, Mignolo), where the thinking from the margins, from the border holds possibilities of understanding and contestation that overflow and extend in a radical and creative way the critical thinking that grows within the epistemic territory of modernity. Border-thinking appears as a privileged cite to behold modernity/coloniality from the outside, to decentre it and bring it to the question of translation, the question of plurality and difference. Translation as an activity of the borders, as the in-between multiple knowledges holds a unique possibility of creation and re-creation (Paz).