Toward a decolonial dialogue: problematizing epistemological flashpoints in Grafting Chinese educational discourses to the English wor(l)d

Within a decolonial context of transnational education studies, the question of how to explicate, and inevitably, translate or graft non-Western knowledges to the still dominant English wor(l)d against Western modernity-coloniality remains ethically pressing and yet paradigmatically challenging. This paper aims to problematize and subvert the colonial dynamics of grafting, and translation in a broader sense, on three layers. First, it theorizes translation as a linguistic-cultural-epistemic praxis, a double entanglement of translatability and untranslatability, and of coloniality and decoloniality, at stake in cross-cultural knowledge transfer and reproduction. Second, it examines China’s flagship educational text, Shēngmìng-shíjiàn jiàoyùxué, and its English translation, Life-Practice Educology, demonstrating how translation can become a (self)colonial and decolonial entanglement in grafting indigenous knowledge onto English wor(l)ds. That is, how can translation be mobilized or dissected to decolonize translation itself? Lastly, it spells out some methodological challenges of translating the untranslatable across languages/epistemes. Zooming in on China, this paper enriches global decolonial praxis in re-invoking the (non-Western) indigenous as an alternative to Western modernity-coloniality and in grafting it onto the modern and/or English wor(l)d.