Translating the Postcolony: On Gender, Language, and Culture

In this article, I seek to advance an understanding of translation that goes beyond treating it as a mere metaphor, as is the way it is often treated in postcolonial and cultural studies. Rather, through a postcolonial feminist lens, I seek to survey and interrogate the complex relationship of racialized and gendered subjects to language, and the implications of translating these lives in a way that makes them intelligible to the West’s hegemonic modernity. After providing an overview of the tensions between linguistic translation and cultural translation, I argue that the racialized gendered Third World subject experiences what I term a double ouster from modernity’s frames of intelligibility. From there, I explore the potential for hybridity to transcend the problem of untranslatability and conclude with remarks on the ramifications that such translations have on doing cross-cultural feminist research.