Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence. O.Tofighian, 2025. London and New York, Routledge. xvi + 231 pp, £145 (hb), £38.99 (pb)

This is not a work from the ivory tower. A proclivity for the armchair is perhaps an occupational hazard of the discipline, but one that makes Omid Tofighian's philosophical work – rooted as it is in years of activism against the Australian border regime in its various manifestations, as well as his own experiences as a displaced Iranian – all the more refreshing. Tofighian is currently best known for his translation of Behrouz Boochani's award-winning No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Sydney: Picador, 2018), a book that, written entirely in the form of text messages sent from a smuggled mobile phone in one of Australia's notorious offshore immigration detention centres, resists classification. Creating New Languages of Resistance grew out of this rather fraught translational endeavour, offering a set of philosophical reflections on translation as a form of resistance appended with a wealth of archival material charting the production and afterlives of the text. The book proceeds broadly as follows: Chapter 1 introduces an understanding of translation that foregrounds the easily-elided ‘plans’ and ‘processes’ involved in manifesting the final translation product, which Tofighian exemplifies with reference to the work he did with Boochani and others. Chapter 2 moves on to the idea of translation as a creative form of public philosophy that has the power to generate ‘new knowledges’ by introducing the foreign into the familiar. Chapter 3 then offers a detailed case study of this collaborative work of translational resistance drawing on a 23-day siege in Manus detention centre in 2017; Chapter 4 considers the broader impact of this translation work; and Chapter 5 reiterates the major themes. In practice, this book presents itself as an instance of what it champions: the result of a ‘shared philosophical activity’, fusing dialogue, text messages, and interview formats, interspersed with ideas from Tofighian's own philosophical scholarship. There is a proliferation of lengthy quotations, and at times the book reads more like a collage of reflections and interview fragments than a systematically argued text; given the collaborative public philosophy focus, however, I suspect that this polyphony is precisely the point. In the following, I will examine some of the claims that come through most clearly in the text, focusing in particular on Tofighian's theory of translation, and problematise certain points that I think are worthy of further discussion. The primary argument of Tofighian's text is an epistemic one: the social imaginaries that structure the mainstream narratives around refugees are reductive and dangerous, and fail to reflect the experiences of the marginalised. Translation becomes a way of expanding the epistemic resources available in the public discourse in ways that reflect more closely the self-understandings of those affected, shifting the language to one of, rather than about, refugees, which in turn creates the possibility of epistemic justice. An observation that clearly suggests itself (but which Tofighian does not make explicit) is that his translation takes on a very etymologically literal role: the marginalised perspectives of those who are stranded on the border and not permitted to cross – to enter into the space of mainstream discourse – are then taken up by Tofighian who, as translator, carries across (trans-latio) the perspective that cannot cross by itself. Translation becomes an act of resistance already insofar as it opposes the imperative to keep the foreign out; the affective thrust of the text smuggles in precisely what the border policies are intended to ward against. This challenges the orthodoxy of the mainstream narrative (whether the threat-laced ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric or the ‘suffering victim’ trope) by confronting it with an alternative discourse, a language of resistance. One of Tofighian's primary examples of creative translational praxis is his rendering of Boochani's system-e hākem as ‘The Kyriarchal System’. Boochani's Persian coinage draws on discourses of Kurdish resistance to capture how the logics of militarism, colonialism, racism, and so on intersect in what he calls the ‘soul of the system’, carrying genealogical resonances that Tofighian's initial attempts – ‘government system’, ‘dominating system’, ‘oppressive system’ – failed to reflect. Tofighian finally settled on feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's ‘kyriarchy’, a term that similarly eschews the reduction of oppressive logics to a single axis, for example, of patriarchy, but rather emphasises the convergence of multiple forms of oppression in one interlocking, mutually reinforcing complex of domination. (Tofighian's use of ‘kyriarchy’ also adds a specifically feminist resonance that travels beyond the male camps of Manus Prison to include the gendered oppressions faced, for instance, in the Nauru facility.) Tofighian appears to distinguish ‘kyriarchy’ from existing concepts like ‘intersectionality’ by extending the latter with an agentic dimension implicit also in Boochani's system-e hākem, something like a will to domination. The introduction of the term, beyond importing something of Boochani's context, is intended to help grapple conceptually with ‘the intensification of intersectional forms of violence, its global and systemic nature, its colonial legacy, the physical-psychological-emotional-spiritual nexus of the systematic torture’ (p. 72) in the detention centres by providing a new language for it. Of course, this kind of translation is not a passive act – as Tofighian emphasises again and again, there is a form of creativity at work here, an agency that is often elided in the more mechanistic conception of translational praxis (one that is perhaps regaining traction in this age of artificial intelligence). Insofar as translation is not simply a routine transferral of meaning, it is necessarily subject to the translator's interpretational whims. This is hardly a radical notion, but it does give us cause to wonder about the extent to which a translation ultimately centres the normative commitments of its author. As the example of kyriarchy shows, this creative power is more explicit in Tofighian's translation of Boochani's work than usual: the reconfiguration of thousands of WhatsApp messages from Kurdish-inflected Persian/Farsi into a publishable book of English prose-poetry perhaps required a more involved translational effort than a more straightforward rendering of an existing novel into a new language. But with this power comes responsibility: what does this translation, with all its interpretive agency, choose to foreground, and what does it choose to elide? The worry I want to raise is that this control over interpretation might pave the way for its own kind of violence. Tofighian himself observes that ‘Translators have the potential to challenge injustice in ways unavailable to other activists (however, they also have the power to enact violence in ways that other oppressors are unable to)’ (p. 67). Tofighian's particular concern here is more with the elision of foreignness than the potential of perniciously distorting the source narrative. ‘Stories related to a translation plan render the evolving translation process and product as inherently political’, he claims (pp. 26–27), citing the performative orientalism of certain missionary and anthropological texts that cast everything they encountered solely in the hermeneutic frames of the colonisers' language. This is expressly not Tofighian's aim, given his repeated insistence on manifesting the realities that escape the ambit of the target language's vocabularies. I wonder, though, whether there is such a clean separation here – ‘traduttore, traditore!’, as a final snippet of inserted interview in the conclusion of Tofighian's book tellingly observes. The object of the discussion (held between two translators, Sara Khalili and Ilan Stavans) is censorship, and its uses in literature. ‘Cleansing’, Stavans proclaims, ‘Purifying. We cannot live without censorship’ (p. 211). Khalili agrees: ‘Translators consciously sift, rewrite, reword, compromise, and to some extent filter while rendering a book into another language. … Translation, by its very nature, shares these functions with censorship. Where the two differ is in their intentions. The translator strives to convey, whereas the censor aims to purge’ (ibid.). This may be true, but it also gives rise to a certain anxiety: if the translator is by nature a censor (a traitor even), how does he ensure fidelity to those he aims to represent – particularly when epistemic justice is the aim? Tofighian is insistent on enabling us to ‘imagine alternative forms of emplotment’ for the refugee (p. 140). But Black feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman points to the slipperiness of such methodologies, observing that ‘emplotting the slave’ is dangerous: every attempt to do so, even in leftist narratives of political agency, risks obliteration (‘The Position of the Unthought’, Qui Parle, 2003, p. 184). This seems to me particularly sharp in the case of translation – how to render difference familiar, without annihilating it? Tofighian is of course acutely aware of the ways in which the dominant discourse tends to swallow up and render impotent political critiques from the margins. He is perpetually trying to draw attention to the ways in which different agents ‘participate in the construction, representation and enactment of particular “victim-saviour” dynamics which transform acts of resistance into commodities for exchange and for public consumption’ (p. 14). His entire neologistic project is concerned with developing vocabularies that avoid slipping into the bland language of liberal humanitarianism, which reduces the refugee to a list of disempowering tropes – ‘caged person’, ‘desperate supplicant’, ‘tragic victim’, and so on are all ‘limited stereotypical constructions that depict deficit models and are primarily designed to evoke only sympathy or empathy (in relation to the systematic torture of indefinite detention is empathy at all possible?)’ (pp. 14–15). He is particularly wary of white-saviour narratives, asking: ‘how do we erase and obfuscate while we try to do something to support displaced, exiled and incarcerated peoples? Do we conceal from view the reality of our own racism and other kinds of bordering in our relationships and encounters with refugees? What is our own vicinity to violence?’ (p. 17, my emphasis). I am inclined to agree with Tofighian that ‘the language and format of journalism are insufficient and potentially misleading when it comes to communicating the brutal realities of indefinite detention’ (p. 60). Facts banalise, statistics reduce lives to numbers, and the media landscape often operates precisely within the discourses Tofighian's work aims to dismantle. But here, the ambiguity of his own position strikes again. He worries that the ‘languages of kyriarchy produce artifacts and ideas and distribute them strategically throughout socio-cultural spaces’ to help ‘build order, influence decisions and interpretations’; thus, ‘Constructed artifacts and ideas are dangerous and saturate the social imaginary’ (p. 12). But what are Tofighian's own languages and frameworks, including ‘kyriarchy’ itself, if not ‘constructed artifacts and ideas’ – ideas, in fact, that he hopes to distribute strategically throughout socio-cultural spaces (as through this book) to influence interpretations? Surely such constructions are inevitable – crucial, even, given the discourse-expanding moment of Tofighian's ‘new languages’ paradigm – but they function as counternarratives that ultimately exploit similar meaning-making mechanisms as the kyriarchal logics they hope to displace. Of course, Tofighian aims to pluralise, where the dominant narrative reduces. However, the question of whether or not these new frameworks do justice to the unspeakable experiences they wish to convey remains. Insofar as it is possible to ever eliminate such concerns, I think Tofighian does remarkably well – he is keenly aware of his position, of his own vicinity to violence, and it is his repeated emphasis on translation as a shared, collective, collaborative project that vindicates his approach. Chapter 3 in particular does much to assuage any concerns a reader with a particular sensitivity to the vagaries of the interpretational will to power might have. ‘Collaborative work with people targeted by the detention industry requires forming place-based and situation-specific intellectual, artistic and political approaches and ways of thinking, and modes of production that honour and galvanise them’, Tofighian observes, emphasising the ways in which the necessarily intersectional and globally entangled dimensions of such a critique require that these collaborative approaches ‘are always open to reselection, rearrangement, re-manoeuvring and redirection’ (p. 92). To the extent that the worry about ‘emplotting the refugee’ is concerned with totalising interpretational gestures that elide the particularity of the marginalised experience, Tofighian's actual translational praxis – with its sensitivity to place, position, and the specificities of intellectual histories – is exemplary: ‘The cultural worlds we occupy and our social positioning within structures and systems combine to impact our ways of knowing. Therefore, the theory of knowledge necessary for interpreting and translating must be in respectful and consistent dialogue with the dynamics shaping the lived experience of those in offshore and onshore indefinite detention’ (p. 147). As already noted, the main strategy Tofighian employs to avoid the reinscription of damaging stereotypes and problematic reductions is to ‘prioritise the literary, philosophical and political influences and histories characterising refugee life worlds’ (p. 148) – the hope is to render these translated experiences in terms familiar to the source and foreign to the target, in order to unsettle dominant narratives and provide new epistemic resources for grasping the marginalised experience. This conception of translation recalls Walter Benjamin, and it is unsurprising that Tofighian makes explicit reference to the latter's seminal text on the topic. Benjamin suggests a translator ought to ‘expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language’ (Selected Writings Volume 1, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 262), which is precisely Tofighian's political objective: expanding a language can expand its moral imaginaries, such is the claim. However, Benjamin goes on to articulate a particular concern about the limits of such activities, which I want to take up here. Waxing poetic about Hölderlin's Sophocles translations as ‘prototypes of their form’ (ibid.), Benjamin indicates that they are thus ‘subject to the enormous danger inherent in all translations: the gates of a language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence’ (ibid.). Uptake is never guaranteed; sometimes the insistence of preserving the foreign – of importing another perspective – effectively limits engagement on the part of the target audience. Tofighian does register a concern along these lines – he acknowledges that ‘Carving our own spaces and using our own language to achieve goals has always involved the serious risks of being further marginalised, suppressed, ignored and/or misunderstood’ (p. 93). Nonetheless, he insists on the renegade potential of the ‘cracks’ that are opened up in mainstream discourses through these projects of collaborative translational worldmaking – Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains, with its celebrated reception and the widespread engagement it provoked, is presented as one such case of successful rupture. However, despite the optimism with which Tofighian concludes his retrospective, a slight note of dissatisfaction pervades his account that makes me wonder whether this concern about uptake might prevail. He observes that ‘in many cases, the kyriarchal system is simply viewed as a general synonym for oppression or violence’ (p. 186), suggesting that sometimes, the novel frameworks his careful translational praxis offer are not received in ways that genuinely expand the mainstream discourse, defaulting back to the well-trodden paths of more familiar vocabularies – the new languages of resistance fail to take hold; the translator is enclosed in silence. More generally, Tofighian worries about the ways in which the enthusiastic reception of No Friend but the Mountains neglects to take into account broader narratives of resistance from Manus Island, and notes in an aside that ‘In some cases, scholars and critics do not examine the book as both a translation and collaboration, or they discuss important features of the book that are exclusive to the English edited translation – and based on specific translation techniques, decisions and strategy – without investigating the collaboration between author, translator and others’ (p. 154). This is not purely resentment over the elision of his own creative role (although he does note that ‘Acknowledgement and credit for translation and collaboration has been an issue in many instances – and something incredibly difficult and awkward to address (personally, professionally, and especially culturally) considering the extreme circumstances’ (p. 187)). Rather, it calls to mind the broader argument that eliding the translational context can its the of a translation product without and in the translation and translation risks creative resistance into a and impotent product for public within the refugee (p. Tofighian never it in these perhaps the worry is that within the mainstream discourse, Boochani can be out as an with a without a of the of its Tofighian's complex translational a rather than the of a language for resistance. I suspect it is this worry that the production of this particular book – it is an to and the to beyond the of the No Friend but the Mountains and more with the context from which it This is a and the work a genuinely and perspective on translation and even as it an to in the philosophical it However, it suggests that Tofighian's work has not in the discourse particularly in its Tofighian clearly has a to with In fact, he claims is only to Manus in terms of being the most and I have ever (p. Australian are as another of kyriarchy – centres of knowledge production that ideas and are entangled with the logics of and Tofighian is but this does not the that despite his various to more public forms of he is within these discourses as he hopes to expand As an however, this book the out the ways in which are with oppressive systems and us to with the that from this position of even the most with those on the are often is here, I that the power for those of us in the ivory it the question – one we ought to both as and – what is our own vicinity to