Translation and Global Criticality: A Spivakian Praxis

This article brings into play questions of translation, untranslatability and mistranslating operative in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ as well as the project of Of Grammatology it ushers. It does so in order to explore the concept of ‘global criticality’ such as it is developed out of Spivak’s work. The piece gives an informative account of the series of plenary panels at the Modern Language Association which, starting in 2018, scrutinized problems arising from the work of cultural translation and which carried forward and further developed this concept of ‘global criticality’.