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#16 Translation and Cultural Politics - Spring 2010 - 筆譯研究方法專論

張貼者： NTNU GITI BLOG on 2010年2月22日 星期一
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#16 Translation and Cultural Politics
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic

3 意見:

charlotte wu 提到...

In these two chapters, Paul de Man’s notion of ‘allegory of reading’ seems to be underpinned in Spivak’s argument. As the book title, The Death of a Discipline, suggests, Spivak is proposing a new foothold, a new perspective in Comparative Literature. That is, to combine Comparative literature with Area Studies, or in her words, comparative literature ‘supplemented’ by Area Studies. The reason I think Spivak’s argument is closely linked to Paul de Man’s lies in two aspects of Spivak’s argument: in the combination of comparative literature and area studies and in the dialectical relationship between ethnos and ethnikos. First, for de Man, in Allegory of Reading, he argues the ‘reading ’ of literary works should not be restricted in decoding the referential meaning of units. Rather, it should be read in terms of the intertwined interaction between the internal and external meaning of the text. I think, this intertwined interaction between the internal and external meaning can be seen as the basis for Spivak’s ‘new’ comparative literature (with the supplement of area studies). With the combination of comparative literature and area studies, not only form and meaning can be reconciled, but the hybridity of language can be revealed. In discussing border crossing between cultures, I think Spivak raises a very insightful point: cultural studies is usually a metropolitan phenomenon. The border crossing of the periphery and the obstacles embedded in its border crossing is scarcely disclosed.

Second, with regard to the dialectical relationship between ethno and ethnikos, it not only specifies the two sides of ‘community’—finding the collective sameness as well as the divided self against the community, it also points out that in the global age, the borders of communities are not static anymore. What is colonial or anti-colonial or what is our culture and other’s culture can hardly be situated in a clear-cut demarcation anymore. And that is why Spivak is encouraging the ‘reading ’ that dis-figures the figures into the responsible reality. In my opinion, I would say that this kind of reading is the ‘allegory of reading’ that de Man suggests.

In an overall sense, I think Spivak has embodied de Man’s reading in her own reading of the potential problems embedded in comparative literature. And she has done the job quite well. I think the issue that comparative literature was facing then is also the issue that translation studies is facing now. To me, the most insightful point she has pointed out is that segregation and globalization is in fact developing at the same time. If globalization is not developing in a certain context, then that context is segregated by the ‘globalized’ community. This essentialist viewpoint is probably Spivak want her readers to read into and dis-figure. And in translation studies, translation has also played as the ‘connector/segregator’ as the same time. Especially in terms of the translation of/into English, when something is translated into/from English, the connection with the English readership also suggests the segregation with the non-English readership. And when English has played as the lingua franca nowadays, the potential segregation of English on other languages can even be stronger. And I think translators and translation researchers should have this kind of awareness.

2010年6月6日 下午2:11
Unknown 提到...

In this week’s reading, “The Postcolonial Exotic”, Graham Huggan discusses the present situation of Postcolonial Studies as it continues to thrive in the ‘age of the global commodity culture’. Huggan notes that although critiques of postcolonialism are often ‘vulnerable to the identical criticisms that their proponents are so keen to level’, the concerns that they bring to light are legitimate ones. One such concern is whether or not a ‘postcolonial literary/critical industry that is centred on, and caters to, the West’ can avoid being implicated with aspects of neo-imperialism. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital, Huggan argues that the field of Postcolonial Studies is split between two ‘regimes of value’, namely postcolonialism and postcoloniality. Huggan explains that postcolonialism can be thought of as an ‘anti-colonial intellectualism that reads and valorises the signs of social struggle in the faultlines of literary and cultural texts’. As we can see here then, postcolonialism’s ‘discourse of resistance’ plays a major role in Huggan’s description. It is this ‘rhetoric of resistance’ that Huggan goes on to describe as a consumer product that has value ascribed to it under contemporary ‘practices’ associated with the phenomenon of globilization. It is with regard to this notion of postcolonialism as consumer product that Huggan goes on to explain postcoloniality as ‘a value-regulating mechanism within the global late-capitalist system of commodity exchange’. According to Huggan, the position that present-day postcolonial scholars find themselves in is one of ‘struggle between these two competing regimes of value’. One of the more important ‘commodities’ that exists for Postcolonial Studies in the global market is that of ‘exoticism’. Huggan defines exoticism as: “a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity.” This definition is then followed by what I think is perhaps a more subtle yet important point, namely the notion that all of these different relations – strange/familiar; marginal/central; colonized/colonizer – may be ‘recoded to serve different, even contradictory, political needs and ends’. I believe that such a relativist view is helpful in that it offers scholars the means, and perhaps the motivation, to reflect upon the larger context in which their own writing/scholarship exists. Such ‘反省’ is of course important in a field such as Postcolonial Studies when, as Huggan explains, the postcolonial has become ‘an object of contestation between potentially incompatible ideologies, political factions, and interest groups’. In fact, Huggan uses the last couple of paragraphs of the Introduction to introduce the idea that presently there are indeed postcolonial scholars who are attempting to work from within this system of ‘exoticist codes of representation’ in order to ‘subvert these codes’ or to ‘redeploy them for the purpose of uncovering differential relations of power’.

2010年6月11日 晚上11:57
charlotte wu 提到...

In this chapter, Huggan focuses on the commoditization of the term ‘post-colonialism’. He first distinguishes postcolonialism and postcoloniality, indicating that while postcolonialism is related to the resistance of colonial power structure, postcoloniality is closely tied to the global commodity exchange. I wonder whether these two aspects can be separated in a clear-cut manner. This is not to deny the distinctions between them. Nevertheless, I think the postcolonial resistance may in a way be enhanced by the postcoloniality. As Huggan indicates, the exoticism in the 20th century is not by the expansion of nation, but by the expansion of the market. To some extent, if those eroticized cultural goods become the commodity for postcolonality, which, by entering the ‘center’ culture, may raise the awareness of the diaspora of the ‘other’ (though this is distorted by the ‘self’ of the centre culture). Then that appreciation/ sympathy for the exotic may then lead to postcolonialism, the resistance of the power structures imposed on them. Theoretically, I do think Huggan is making a very strong and powerful argument on critiquing the vague and ill-defined nature of postcolonialism. But I wonder how we can get rid of the eye of our ‘self’ when we are already living in a world of translation of others through our own cultural systems.
The second part that I found interesting is the relation between exoticism and marginality. In this part, I think Huggan is making a very good exemplification of how academia is also influenced by the late capitalism. As Huggan suggests, academic discourse on postcolonialism is also packaged as cultural commodity, which reveals what the readers in the ‘center’ want to and are able to see or accept. He even terms cultural theorists/ translators as ‘cultural brokers’. In my point of view, I don’t look the term ‘cultural broker’ in a completely negative way. Indeed, the monopoly of certain favorable ‘cultural commodity’ is problematic. Just as Huggan indicates, what exoticism brings in is the ‘predictable line’ with ‘unpredictable content’. Hence, what cultural translators/brokers need to do is to break the predictable routine or value judgment, rather than stop translating between cultures. Doing nothing (i.e. not to introduce the cultural commodity) isn’t going to change the postcolonial/ capitalistic context. Therefore, I would say that Huggan’s effort in this chapter is not to ask us to stop looking into others’ world, but to point out that we are now using the inevitable ‘strategic exoticism’ in order to reveal more about others. This ‘strategic exoticism’ may not be the perfect solution, but it could be a practical one.
All in all, I think the arguments in this chapter do provide us with the indispensible warning on the using of the rather comprehensive (but maybe too comprehensive) term— ‘postcolonialism’.

2010年6月12日 凌晨12:17

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