Wednesday, 20 April 2016

Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context,
Tejaswini Niranjana, University of California Press, 2015, page 35

If history has been rewritten by a dominating 'colonial' power, then how do we read the "effective text"? Niranjana explains that this means asking questions such as:

Who uses or interprets the text? How is it used and for what? Both the critique of representation and the critique of historicism empower the post-colonial theorust to undertake an analysis of what Homi Bhabha (following Foucault) has called technologies of colonial power.

This addresses the problem of translation and allows a critical examination of 'representation and reality' to take place. Where is there evidence of a text having been rewritten by a translator's (or a translator's patron) 'colonial' discourse, so as to render the common understanding in a different way to that in which it is understood by the text's rightful owners. And if the text is then not a written text, but a cultural tradition or a religious conviction ...