My ongoing research project, Overlapping Edges: Feeling Translation, enquires into embodied and affective engagements with translation, figured here as a persistent condition, or state, as well as a textual practice and conceptual framework. My research method, what I am currently calling “disaster translation,” is intended to potentially serve as a continuous mode of analysis and representation for what art historian T.J. Demos terms “crisis globalisation,” with its concomitant economic inequality, mass migration, and military conflict. In short, what is translation if it is enacted as a mode of languaging – and thus also of being – that is divergent and omnidirectional, disloyal and insurgent, emphasising a poetics of dislocation, contingency, and infidelity?
Thinking and making alongside what literary theorist Emily Apter describes as “checkpointisation” – assertions by nation-state apparatuses vis-à-vis formal and informal policing – this project investigates how translating towards difference and incommensurability, that is, languaging against nation-state apparatuses of linguistic and juridical legibility, may illuminate or reveal the border violence and displacement inflicted upon bodies, language, and land. This project currently contains multiple components, including experimental translation workshops, cross-genre textual investigations, a cross-disciplinary translation studies curriculum, performance, and sculpture.
