Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Languages in the Americas 0816547823, 9780816547821

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TRANSLATION AND EPISTEMICIDE

TRANSLATION and

EPISTEMICIDE Racialization of Languages in the Americas

JO SHUA M. P R I C E

The University of Arizona Press www​.uapress​.arizona​.edu We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to twenty-­two federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service. © 2023 by The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published 2023 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­8165-­4782-­1 (hardcover) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­8165-­4783-­8 (ebook) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover art: Perdido en el Amazonas by Keko, 2003. See @kekomaria on Instagram. Typeset by Leigh McDonald in Warnock Pro 10.5/14 and Grotesque MT Std (display) Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Price, Joshua M., author. Title: Translation and epistemicide : racialization of languages in the Americas / Joshua M. Price. Description: Tucson : Universty of Arizona, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014521 (print) | LCCN 2022014522 (ebook) | ISBN 9780816547821 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780816547838 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting—Social aspects—America. | Knowledge, Sociology of. | Colonization. | Racism in language. Classification: LCC P306.97.S63 P75 2023 (print) | LCC P306.97.S63 (ebook) | DDC 418/.02—dc23/ eng/20220524

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014521

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014522 Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents and Constanza

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsix

Introduction: Translation and Epistemicide

3

1. Colonization and Commensuration: Asymmetries in the Making of Bilingual Dictionaries

23

2. The Anguish of Decolonial Translation: José María Arguedas and Walter Benjamin

53

3. Translation as Terrorism?

75

4. Translating Performance in Latin America

107

5. La Jotería: Stereoscopic Readings Against Epistemicide 137

Conclusion: An Ethics and Politics of Bewilderment

150

References165 Index183

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IT IS WITH GRIEF AND GRATITUDE that I offer this little book. Grief—­ because colonialism is a subject of grief and death. Grief—­because so many of my most important teachers, closest friends, and colleagues have passed away in the last couple of years. Let me start with the beloved dead. I am grateful to Marilyn Gaddis Rose, who from the beginning provided encouragement, expert editing, and an invitation to publish an article on translation and colonialism, with an eye to its contribution to translation theory. I would like to express my appreciation for her generosity, solicitude, and collegiality. María Lugones sent me down a line of thinking that led me to write this book. She sent me pictures of her garden in bloom just before she went into the hospital. Aníbal Quijano pressed me to consider coloniality and decoloniality. He and Carmen Pimentel provided me with the gift of their warm companionship. Lubna Chaudhry and I were reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments when she did not call in one Saturday. Their deaths leave me less tethered to the planet. Then Lillian DePaula and Lourdes Pérez Montalvo, among so many others who will go unnamed here. In reflecting on their untimely passing, it is hard to avoid Saidiya Hartman’s and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s interpretations of racism manifesting itself as premature death. Let me turn to the living.

x Acknowledgments

I wish to convey my gratitude to Allyson Carter, the staff at the University of Arizona Press, and two anonymous external reviewers for their crucial comments, editorial assistance, and book design—­and for giving this manuscript a home. Matt Gleeson was an amazing editor. The art on the cover is a detail from Perdido en el Amazonas (2003) by the extraordinary Colombian artist Keko. This work accompanied me during this book’s gestation. I have spent countless hours peering into it and trying to understand it. The concept of “bewilderment,” central to the book, is inspired in part by Keko’s painting. I use it with his kind permission. Gracias, hermano. For their insights on law, jurisprudence, and procedure, I would like to acknowledge Mohammad Fadel, Miguel Kagan, Maya Hess, Ellen Elias-­Bursać, and especially the brilliant Lena Salaymeh. I acknowledge Boaventura de Sousa Santos, from whom I take the term “epistemicide.” Mario Vilca and Lucila Bugallo have shown me hospitality and companionship and taught me a great deal about the Puna and thinking in the Altiplano. Gabriela Veronelli translated Arguedas’s writing with me and discussed colonialism and language. Rita Kothari has been a friend and an inspiration—­what an amazing writer, translator, and thinker. Shai Lavi, Sarah Hoagland, Marella Feltrin-­Morris, René Lemieux, Eric Cheyfitz, Karen Bennett, Tarek Shamma, Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Julia Schiavone-­Camacho, PJ DiPietro, Rick Santos, Ernesto Martínez, Julio Fierro, Nicholas De Genova, and Alejandro Zamora have all helped me think through issues in this book. I also wish to thank Felipe Gómez for his insights and thoughtful attention. I acknowledge the support I received at Binghamton University through the years from Chenqing Song and Michael Pettid, successive directors of the Translation Research and Instruction Program at Binghamton University. My colleagues in sociology, Latin American studies, translation studies, linguistics, the Human Rights Institute, and the Program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture made Binghamton an engaging home. I appreciate the welcome and the opportunity I now have to work with great colleagues and students at Toronto Metropolitan University. I recognize with gratitude the Special Projects Grant of TMU’s School of Arts and the support of Pamela Sugiman, dean; Patrizia Albanese, associate dean; and Idil Atak of the Department of Criminology.

Acknowledgments xi

My work has been greatly enriched by research stays and participation in scholarly collectives beyond my home institutions. My appreciation to Peter Birle, Friedhelm Schmidt-­Welle, and the research staff at the Ibero-­Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. I had the opportunity to use the IAI archives and present my work in their seminars on two occasions; I received critical feedback, especially from Sergio Serulnikov and Jorge Coronado, and what I learned textured my understanding of colonization in Latin America. With respect and affection, I acknowledge Junia Mattos Zaidan, Patrick Rezende, and Lillian DePaula, who invited me and María Constanza Guzmán to the Seminário Internacional do Observatório de Tradução: Arte, Mídia e Ensino at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Vitória, Brazil) for three days of dialogue and learning. Uma experiência inesquecível. Junia has since been a sustaining interlocutor. Obrigado. Early parts of this book were also developed within the framework of the research project La Construcción del Saber del Traductor, Grupo de Investigación en Traductología, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia, led by Martha Pulido, in which I participated as part of the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program. Drs. Susan Antebi and Valentina Napolitano facilitated my stay as a visiting scholar in Latin American studies at the University of Toronto. Librarians and archivists also led me along the way; the resources at the New York Public Library and the Rose Reading Room were indispensable in the early stages of this work. Quiero agradecer a los programas, instituciones, seminarios y proyectos que me brindaron el espacio para presentar versiones anteriores de partes de este libro. Shai Lavi collaborated with me on a joint lecture series on translating epistemologies hosted by the Center for the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy of Central European University. I thank Laura Pérez and PJ DiPietro, who invited me to present at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California; Meritxell Serrano Tristán, from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, who invited me and María Constanza Guzmán to do a workshop with her wonderful students; Bruno Poncharal and his colleagues, who invited me to give a keynote at the colloquium on translation and French contemporary thought at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Mi compa Dalida María Benfield invited me to a panel at the World Social Forum in Montreal. Portions of this text were also delivered at symposia and colloquia on

xii Acknowledgments

translation and power, including at the Tunisian Association for English Language Studies; the Beyond Linguistic Plurality Conference organized by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul); the Translating Creolization Symposium, University of the West Indies; the Caribbean Philosophical Association; el Congreso Bienal de la Red Latinoamericana de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación; the Canadian Association for Translation Studies / Association canadienne de traductologie; Epistemologias do Sul / Epistemologies of the South at Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal); and the working group on translation theory at Binghamton University with Drs. Rachid Idr Aadnani and Michael Toler. I would also like to thank the organizers and respondents at La Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Universidad Nacional de Jujuy; the Instituto Interdisciplinario Tilcara; Facultad de Filosof ía y Letras at Universidad de Buenos Aires; the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales and Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social in Argentina; the Committee on Globalization and Social Change, CUNY Graduate Center; Asociación Colombiana de Traductores y Intérpretes; Hampshire College; and Glendon College, York University (Toronto). Students in seminars at many of these locations and in my graduate and undergraduate classes on translation theory and colonization at Binghamton University helped me refine and clarify my ideas. Camille Gagnier, Saqer Almarri, Musa Alzghoul, Amber Carlsson, and Emma Oliveira provided research and editorial assistance. Eternal gratitude to Mohamed Aly and Ellen Boesenberg for their love, care, and sustaining friendship. Quiero agradecer también a mi amigo entrañable Fabián Ovejero y su hermosa familia. Agradezco profundamente a la murga Los Desconocidos de Siempre de Almagro, sobre todo la familia Ibáñez, Petty, Sole, y la muy querida y muy extrañada Nancy, quienes me recibieron en su casa y en su murga y me brindaron tanto cariño. ¡Gracias por la pasión murguera! Agradeço muito a Juba and Mestre Fran da Associação Cultural Capoeira Maculelê. Going through the batizado was a transformative experience. Gracias y obrigado to Chileno, my capoeira teacher at Binghamton. You taught me so much. A capoeira y la murga me llevaron a conocer y entrar a otros ritmos americanos que no conocía, me transformaron y ahora hacen parte de mí. Axé. I would like to express my deep thankfulness to María Constanza Guzmán for her presence in my life. Gracias a la vida. I always thought that

Acknowledgments xiii

happiness would be elusive for someone like me. Meu coração americano. What a source of joy in my life! To go to sleep laughing and to wake up laughing! You accomplish so much with such grace and panache. Your laser focus, commitment, and energy continue to inspire me. And you are the kind of teacher who hugs me when I confuse melcochudo, conchudo, and mechudo. Thank you for the gift of your presence in my life. I dedicate this book to my parents, Monroe E. Price and Aimée Brown Price, models of scholarship, each in their own distinctive way. Thank you for, among (many!) other things, inspiring me with how each of you has lived a scholar’s life.

TRANSLATION AND EPISTEMICIDE

INTRODUCTION Translation and Epistemicide

FROM THE FIF TEENTH CENTURY THROUGH the present day, translation practices have facilitated colonialism. Epistemicide is one result. Epistemicide, as described by legal theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2005, 2014), involves destroying, marginalizing, or banishing Indigenous, subaltern, and counterhegemonic knowledges. As such, it has been a means and a goal of modern imperial powers across the globe. This book gives an account of translation-­as-­epistemicide in the Americas, drawing on a range of examples from the early colonial period to the war on terror. The first four chapters demonstrate four distinct operations that lead to epistemicide: the commensuration of worlds (chapter 1), the epistemic marginalization of subaltern translators and the knowledge they produce (chapter 2), the criminalization of translators and interpreters (chapter 3), and translation as piracy or extractivism (chapter 4). Translation has also been used as a tool to contest colonization. Each of the chapters is accompanied by a counterdiscourse on how these operations are contested, undermined, realigned, or abetted by subaltern translators, interpreters, and theorists. In the final two chapters, I further flesh out examples of decolonial translation.

4 Introduction

CENTRAL QUESTIONS In the signal year of 1492, noted linguist and grammarian Antonio de Nebrija presented the first Spanish (Castilian) grammar book to Queen Isabel. The queen reportedly asked what use the book could possibly be to her, since she already spoke Spanish. “Your Most Enlightened Majesty,” he wrote, “language has always been a companion of empire” (que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio) (Nebrija [1492] 1981). This book proposes a corollary: translation has been a companion or instrument of empire.1 As an instrument of empire, translation has taken various forms. The preeminent example is the translation of the Bible. In the last two centuries, Christian missionaries have, for the purpose of evangelizing, translated the Bible into hundreds of languages throughout the world. The use of Bible translations to promote religious conversion has been one of the most enduring and readily identifiable examples of the imperiling of Indigenous knowledge through cultural domination. For centuries, legions of missionaries have translated not only the Gospels but also the catechism and other Christian teachings and texts into Maya, Guaraní, Tagalog, Wolof, and other languages (see, e.g., Sales 2015; Hanks 2010; Oyěwùmí 1997). As a shorthand, we could call this imperialism through epistemic imposition, or translation-­as-­imposition. However, imposing ideas is only one type of intellectual or epistemic imperialism. If we take Antonio de Nebrija at his word—­that a grammar book can be an instrument of empire—­then we can look for practices 1. Though the focus of this book is translation in the Americas, translation practices have played a crucial role in the battle for control throughout the colonial world (see, for example, Kothari 2018; Tageldin 2011; Bandia 2014; Oyěwùmí 1997; Rafael 1996, 2015, 2016; Sales 2015; Stam and Shohat 2012; Achebe 2009; Mazrui and Mazrui 1998; Valdeón 2014; Chakrabarty 2000; D. Robinson 1997). Nineteenth-­century French colonialists translated Ibn Khaldûn in terms of their own racial categories to justify their divide-­and-­rule racial policies (Hannoum 2003). English colonialists, and their American descendants, have used interpreters and translators to establish their dominion from Shakespeare’s time through the current prosecution of the war on terror (Cheyfitz 1997; Greenblatt 1991; Rafael 2015). Translation scholars have documented many of the ways in which translators and translation practices have both participated in and, at times, combated colonization, or at least redirected or rechanneled colonial power (see, for example, Niranjana 1992; Ngũgĩ 2011; Simon and St-­Pierre 2000; Wolf 2008; Pratt 2007; Shamma 2019).

Introduction 5

of ordering, classifying, naming, labeling, and categorizing as part of a colonial structure. For instance, early bilingual dictionaries were also instruments of colonization. The bilingual dictionary, as we currently think of it, was a sixteenth-­century invention of Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit missionaries from the Iberian Peninsula and other parts of Europe who had devoted years, even decades, to New World evangelism. In order to preach more effectively, Bernardino de Sahagún, Maturino Gilberti, Luis de Valdivia, and others studied languages indigenous to the Americas. The learned clergymen developed word lists, glossaries, and eventually full-­fledged bilingual dictionaries, known as vocabularios, as well as grammars to assist in their missionary work (see chapter 1; see also Calvo Pérez 1997; Sales 2015; Gonçález Holguín [1608] 2007; Valdivia 1606; Gilberti 1559; and Lagunas 1574). These missionaries came to their ministrations with all the precepts and presuppositions of their time regarding language, non-­Christian gods, the humanity of the people they encountered, and whether they possessed souls. Fray Diego Gonçález Holguín’s Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua, o del Inca (1608) left out or distorted Indigenous concepts perceived by the conquistadores as antithetical to Catholicism or diabolical, while he, Ludovico Bertonio, and other missionaries found ways to translate confession, God, the liturgy, and so on by infusing existing Quechua or Aymara words with new meanings or by fashioning hybrid neologisms. This was part of an effort to promote and purvey a Christian worldview and eschatology as truer than and spiritually superior to the subject epistemologies. Under the guise of a word-­for-­word symmetry between languages, the bilingual dictionaries imposed a hidden asymmetry. By linking them together, the bilingual vocabularios transformed Nahuatl, Aymara, Purépecha, and Spanish. In addition to the mutual linguistic transformations built into the vocabularios, these tomes also included introductory narratives that advanced colonial philosophies of language and provided rationales for the study of the subject languages. While a few of the friars praised the dignity of the Nahua, Guaraní, and other people they came to know, and made note of the elegance of their languages, Bertonio and many other priests laid out in their vocabularios a series of complaints about the people and the languages that have

6 Introduction

been repeated by others over the subsequent centuries of colonial and postcolonial rule. For them, Indigenous languages were deficient, lacked crucial concepts, and were unstable. The Spaniards characterized Indigenous people as recalcitrant and dissolute, and their beliefs as magical and dangerous, not least to their very souls. These arguments date from at least the initial period of colonization, although they were prefigured in Catholics’ attitudes toward Jews and Muslims who lived in the Iberian Peninsula in the previous centuries of the Reconquista. Most of these early bilingual dictionaries thus contained an implicit ranking. They were elaborate devices to show that the languages of the Americas, their speakers, and the knowledge they produced were inferior to Castile, its people, and their Christian orthodoxy. In this case, processes of racialization went beyond skin color and extended to the racialization of languages themselves, as well as the racialization of knowledge and religion. In the most extreme cases, missionaries conceptualized the racialized subaltern and colonized subjects as “homunculi,” to use Ginés de Sepúlveda’s infamous phrase (Sepúlveda [1550] 2006), whose subjectivity and humanity were circumscribed and whose intellectual capacity was limited, such that from the standpoint of the logic of Eurocentrism or white supremacy, they were understood to be or were constituted as simple users of language, as Gabriela Veronelli (2012; 2015, 118) has put it, and the knowledge they produced was considered unsatisfactory. Put differently, translating epistemologies from one language to another presupposed and played a crucial role in arranging people and traditions of knowledge into hierarchical categories of worthiness. In this way, translation was, and is, sometimes involved in race-­making. Translation has been, and can be, enlisted as part of a racializing project. Ranging from the symbolic and the social to the material, translation here involves employing rationalities and techniques as part of a system of colonial governance. In the case of Iberian missionaries, epistemicide involved both royal and ecclesiastical authorities. However, employing translation as a technology of the coloniality of power is not confined to one particular form of government, modality of governmentality, or imperial power. It must be emphasized that using translation in the service of colonization was hardly a case of a Western juggernaut rolling over submissive Indigenous cultures and other subaltern cultures such as those of the

Introduction 7

African diaspora. In this uneven war, different elements of the colonial structure (military, ecclesiastical, royal, mercenary, settler) struggled for cultural ascendency against the arrayed elements of Indigeneity (most prominently the existing Aztec/Mexica/Nahua and Inca/Quechua hegemonies as well as the thousands of other nations responding in their respective ways to the threats Europeans posed). Struggles over interpretation have always been at the center of these colonial wars of domination. To have one’s interpretation, or interpretive framework, be ascendant or hegemonic was of key importance. When subaltern interpretations of the world were sidelined or erased, this was epistemic injustice (see Fricker 2007; Medina 2013). Translation is a privileged location from which to identify those struggles over interpretation. Analyzing translation practices is one way to study the struggles on a granular level. Translation, even amid tremendous power imbalances, is not merely a site of passive appropriation or of unresolvable contradictions but rather . . . a site of complex negotiation, deployment, and reworking of Western symbols and images to suit the needs of a target readership. (Baer 2018, 42)

In his work on translating contemporary queer terminology, Brian Baer warns against seeing translation from hegemonic to nonhegemonic cultures as limited to imposing foreign ideas and eclipsing nonhegemonic knowledge: By focusing not only on what is lost but also on “what is brought to life through cultural permeability, exchange, influence or simple coexistence,” translation can be seen as an expression of linguistic and political agency rather than an act of submission to the dominating Anglophone culture. (2018, 42, quoting Kulpa, Mizielinska, and Stasinska 2012)

Embedded within these imperial wars, Indigenous people, people of African descent, and other people racialized as nonwhite, when they have served as translators or interpreters, have been active as linguistic and political agents in just the way that Baer describes. Subaltern translators have sometimes destabilized Eurocentric knowledge, rechanneled it, or

8 Introduction

otherwise shored up resistance to it. They have sometimes succeeded in unsettling the terms of coloniality, to use the term that Sylvia Wynter employed (2003). But the picture is far from black-­and-­white. As they ply their intercultural craft, translators or interpreters also sometimes demonstrate a certain complicity with the terms of domination even as they may otherwise subvert the workings of power. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Latin American criollo intellectuals used translation as part of their ongoing struggles for national and regional independence. Texts such as the French Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of 1789, the United States’ Declaration of Independence, and others were translated as part of emancipation and nation-­building movements (see Bastin 2011, 2006; Piñeiro 2019). This process was not without contradictions; in addition to the importation of European thought for the articulation of the local political structures, some forms of domination were to remain unchanged. For instance, for many bourgeois revolutionaries, independence was consistent with maintaining slavery and gender hierarchy.2 More generally, no matter their identity, translators and interpreters in the Americas have been agents located ambiguously and ambivalently within these larger imperial projects. The ambiguity and ambivalence may be intrinsic to the role of translator. Shuttling between worlds, translators have historically been both valued and maligned, necessary for colonization even while subject to suspicion by colonizer and colonized alike, and feminized as unfaithful (see Ayan 2019). Legions of amanuenses, bilingual lieutenants, kidnapped Taíno, Maya, and other Indigenous people, missionary priests, their Indigenous acolytes, hybrid scholars, court interpreters, conversos, enslaved mistresses, professional linguists, adventurers, amateur philologists, and mestizx royalty have played formal and informal roles as translators in the colonial project.3 Over the centuries countless bilingual and multilingual actors were forcibly enlisted, and sometimes volunteered, in 2. It was a different story for Toussaint L’Ouverture, for whom these revolutionary documents may have inspired a vision of racial equality far beyond that conceived of by their framers. 3. Here and in the rest of the book, in accordance with emerging usage throughout the Spanish-­speaking world, I use a gender-­neutral form of mestizo/a: mestizx. The exception is when an author I cite has opted for exclusive language (e.g., “mestizo”).

Introduction 9

ways planned and unplanned, to translate or interpret in the cultural interface implicit in cultural domination. In these often humble, barely visible roles, usually outside of the starring part, translators and interpreters contributed to the form modernity has taken in the Americas. Everyone—­ colonizer and colonized—­ was changed through the encounter. Given the monumental violence visited by Europeans on Indigenous nations and people of African, Arab, and Asian descent (among others), combined with the social and cultural complexity of these colonial encounters and the heterogeneity of the elements involved, the mutual changes reverberated throughout every sphere of life—­the material, the economic, the spiritual, the sexual, the racial, and the linguistic. Fernando Ortiz calls these processes of mutual transformation “transculturation” (1940; see also Rama [1982] 2012, 18). Transculturation is a constant and perhaps inevitable part of colonization.

TRANSCULTURATION As early as his first letters back to the Castilian Crown, Columbus introduced new words into Spanish. Ají, canoa, hamaca, and aguacate—­ “chile,” “canoe,” “hammock,” and “avocado”—­are taken from Arawak, Taíno, Nahuatl, Carib, and other languages of the Americas, and have since become a standard part of the Spanish lexicon (Zamora 1993); the standard English words are also derivatives from Indigenous languages. European obsession with chocolate, potatoes, corn, and chile peppers—­ all vegetables of the Americas—­changed not just European gastronomy and European languages but also European and global economies. Indigenous people from (what is now) the Caribbean had used tobacco as part of ritual activity for centuries, possibly millennia; the Europeans took tobacco and industrialized its production, processing, and consumption, thus transforming its meaning and purpose, a process emblematic of transculturation (Ortiz 1940). With the Conquest and the transatlantic slave trade, Catholic practices changed, combining with Yoruba, Quechua, Tupí, and other cultures, as people engaged in spiritual and cultural movements that came to be known as santería, candomblé, the Ghost Dance, and myriad other practices and syncretic traditions. If the resulting hybridity was

10 Introduction

pervasive, the material aspects of appropriation were decidedly one-­ sided. The financing of the Spanish Armada and the gilding of baroque churches throughout Spain relied on the gold and silver taken from the Caribbean and New Granada, or mined in Potosí. These material relations changed Europe. No less important were the conceptual transformations on both sides of the Atlantic related to these material changes. Colonialism represented a technological launchpad for racial or racialized capitalism and the inculcation of binary sexual difference and heteronormativity (Lugones 2007; Gunn Allen 1992; Quijano 1992, 2007; Maldonado-­Torres 2017; C. Robinson 1983). Coloniality refers to the structures, institutions, epistemologies, material relationships, and worldviews that maintain a racial hierarchy (Quijano 1992, 2014; Maldonado-­Torres 2016). The origin and character of European modernity itself is tied to coloniality and to colonialism (Dussel 1993; Quijano 1992; Mignolo 1995). Modernity has tied into it a discourse of superiority, of Eurocentrism. Modernity conceals or seeks to justify the depredations of colonialism. Epistemicide is one of the aspects of coloniality that modernity often conceals, although at times the epistemicide is clear and evident. Epistemicide is concealed through a variety of strategies that we will explore throughout the subsequent chapters. In each chapter, the examples of epistemicide are placed in the context of cultural exchange, transformation, and transculturation, and within larger social processes that reproduce racial subordination, sexism, and other social hierarchies. At the same time, we will note how translation has been a way of creating spaces for conceptual and cultural flourishing under these evolving forms of domination. A nuanced study of translation practices in contexts of cultural domination and coloniality can be, as David Scott (1999, 17) has put it, an “interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized” as well as the lives of the colonizers. Translation practices are linguistic building blocks for the colonial enterprise in its complexity, accompanied by other aspects of colonization, such as military invasion, enslavement, religious conversion, sexual violence, and the expropriation of mineral wealth. Like these other facets of colonialism, translation has always been an idiom for the exercise of power.

Introduction 11

METHOD: STUDYING REFRACTION The analysis of early bilingual dictionaries exemplifies this book’s method. Each chapter takes cases where translation is at issue and frames these cases in the context of larger historical and political processes. The case studies in the following chapters are not intended to depict a comprehensive chronological narrative of the five-­hundred-­plus years since the Conquest began. Instead, the criterion for selecting examples is their value for building a theory of how translation has been used, not only as a technology for framing and marginalizing nondominant ways of thinking, knowing, and speaking, but also as a tactic by the colonized to try to fend off colonial predations. The moments of nonheroic hesitation and contradiction, as Vicente Rafael has put it, that accompany those tactics also move us to see various forms of partial collusion, uses of irony, and multiple consciousness on the part of the subaltern (Rafael 1996, 4; Puar 2008; Tageldin 2011; Matsuda 1989). Translation “is governed by institutionally defined power relations between the languages/modes of life concerned,” Talal Asad has pointed out (2010, 157). The formative role social forces have played in translation activity points to the need for a theoretical framework to inquire into how different translators are socially located, as well as into the ideologies that guide not just the translator but also the reception of a translation. Charting how a text travels means studying the social life of a translation—­the sociology of translation (see Dongchao 2014; E. Said 1983; Sapiro 2012). Through these processes, texts are inevitably adapted and transformed for a new audience. This is a methodology for studying how a text is refracted across languages, to use André Lefevere’s phrase (Lefevere 2000, 235; see also Bourdieu 1995, 220–­21). Studying this refraction includes examining the social norms at play in how a text or utterance fares in the target, or receiving, society, including whether the translated text is celebrated or stigmatized, seen as a source of power or potential danger, hailed as fresh air by one class or group of people, treated as a source of potential subversion or cultural contamination by another, and so on. An understanding of translation as refraction leads us to see how translation contributes to, or undermines, dominant ways of knowing. The analysis must include the material, semiotic, and

12 Introduction

cultural conditions, or else the description of a translation risks being sociologically anemic. Seeing translation as cultural refraction goes against traditional literary approaches to evaluating a translation. Conventionally, literary criticism of a translated text is reduced to appraising its fidelity to the original and its fluidity. Hence the fixation on what is “lost” in translation and all the clichés that accompany rather narrow views of translation (“Traduttore, traditore,” etc.). To see translation in terms of epistemicide is to move beyond a narrowly aesthetic, lexical, and semantic analysis of textual translation to include analysis of an array of political, historical, material, and even ontological conditions that surround the translation (see Lefevere 2000, 205; Inghilleri 2012, 2016; Wolf 2000, 2008; Simeoni 2015; Alvarez et al. 2014; Sapiro 2012; Casanova 2007; Dongchao 2014). Seeing translation as refraction means seeing translation not as the transposition of an intrinsic and unchanging meaning of a text but as a transforming process of reframing identity, knowledge, or being (see Venuti 2019). The following chapters will examine the translation not only of texts but of worldviews, epistemologies, and ontology (multiple ontologies), as well as the translation of sense of self or selfhood. We can speak broadly of “cultural translation” that is not limited to discussions of semiotic processes, as Claudia de Lima Costa puts it (2014, 20; see also Niranjana 1992; D. Robinson 1997, 1–­6). Cultural translation “is premised on the view that any process of description, interpretation, and dissemination of ideas and worldviews is always already caught up in relations of power and asymmetries between languages, regions, and peoples” (Costa 2014, 20). Cultural agents “translate themselves” from one language to another (see, generally, Alvarez et al. 2014; Arguedas 1939). The notion of translocation provides a rich theoretical vocabulary with which to take stock of the shifting social location of people who travel back and forth among worlds. Sonia Alvarez has described translocation as “linking geographies of power at various scales (local, national, regional, global) with subject positions (gender/sexual, ethnoracial, class, etc.) that constitute the self ” (2014, 2; see also Lao-­Montes and Buggs 2014, 291–­94). This “world”-­travel involves crossing lines of power (Lugones 2003). One implication is that terms do not “translate” easily across lines of power drawn by colonialism. Translating “gender” or

Introduction 13

“woman” across colonial lines of difference, for example, is not the same as asking how to say “bread” in French (see Mehrez 2007). María Lugones has argued that colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. (2007, 186)

On one side of the line, which Lugones terms the “light” side of the colonial/modern gender system, “ordering only the lives of white bourgeois men and women,” “sexual purity and passivity are crucial characteristics of the white bourgeois females who reproduce the class and the colonial and racial standing of bourgeois, white men” (Lugones 2007, 206). But on the other side of the colonial line, people are reduced to the status of animality. Not only are people gendered differently on each side of the line, but the difference is constitutive of the colonial line itself; it is also a relational difference in the sense that white women live the lives they live dependent in part on the lives that women of color and colonized women live, to paraphrase Elsa Barkley Brown (1992, 298). In this book, I will restrict analysis of epistemicide to processes of the racialization of language that construct, presuppose, or suggest that Eurocentric knowledge is inherently better than that of Europe’s others. Epistemicide through translation is part of larger Eurocentric and colonial projects to subordinate non-­European languages, cultures, and traditions and enact practices and frameworks that perform or uphold hierarchical social relations and social processes. Not all translation is epistemicide, not all epistemicide involves translation, and not all epistemicide is Eurocentric or involved in racializing language. Merely changing the meaning of a word or phrase through translation is not a sufficient condition to count as epistemicide, since change or transformation is an intrinsic or inevitable part of the process of translation—­indeed, translation is transformation by definition. To translate a text is to put it in other terms, and thus interpret it. Even when the translation seems to involve destroying or distorting the semantic content, for our purposes this attribute alone will not necessarily be considered epistemicide.

14 Introduction

REFUSAL TO TRANSLATE: ARE THERE WORDS THAT ARE “UNTRANSLATABLE”? On the other hand, in some cases epistemicide is signaled by an organization’s or a legal entity’s refusal to translate. Two examples illustrate the point. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), a programmatic and influential book in performance studies, Diana Taylor argues that the word and concept “performance” is untranslatable. Taylor argues that “performance” should come into Latin America in English because in her view there is no viable alternative. The English word should travel from the Anglo-­American academy to Portuguese-­, Spanish-­, Quechua-­, Guaraní-­, Patois-­, and French-­speaking countries throughout the hemisphere. Does the emerging discipline of performance studies thus perform a kind of intellectual imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere? That is, do its disciplinary categories, even the very terminology of “performance,” risk neocolonial imposition on the Global South (McKenzie 2010; Delgado 2015)? Diana Taylor (2007) and Richard Schechner (2007) argue strenuously that this is not the case. By exploring the nuanced ways in which Latin American dramaturgs, directors, and theater studies professors respond to the challenge of performance studies, one can come to a modulated reading of its reception in Latin America (see chapter 4). A politically laden refusal to translate has also wended its way into the criminal justice system in the United States. A Boston criminal court’s refusal to translate the word and concept “jihad” was at stake in the terrorism trial of translator Tarek Mehanna in 2011. Mehanna was on trial for allegedly translating texts that aided and abetted terrorism. In his defense, Mehanna argued that translating these texts was his way of engaging in jihad, which, he argued, was a common, everyday word that could simply be translated as “struggle” (Mehanna 2012). Fueled by the hyperbole of the war on terror, the prosecution argued that the word “jihad” was untranslatable and referred to terrorism. The court sided with the prosecution, and in its decision, which hinged in part on the meaning of jihad, the court insisted on leaving the word in Arabic. Mehanna’s interpretation of jihad was not taken up by the courts. Refusing to translate jihad was a way to keep the concept “foreign”—­orientalizing Mehanna, in effect, by giving an exotic

Introduction 15

aura to his activities and making him dangerous and foreign, despite his best efforts to frame himself as a homegrown American. Insisting that jihad was untranslatable was a way to criminalize Mehanna and his activities (see chapter 3). Performance and jihad. In each case, powerful people—­powerful forces based in the United States—­argued that certain terms are untranslatable. Though the rationale is different in each, both arguments form part of a larger process of cultural domination. To see the distinct logic in each case, and to see how the logic is epistemicidal, requires taking stock of the social and political stakes involved in a particular refusal to translate. Refusing to translate the performance in performance studies is part of the logic of extractivism, the practice of extracting cultural goods from Latin America and the Global South and using Western categories to sort them. Refusing to translate jihad is part of the logic of criminalizing Arab and Arab American translators. In this way, we can map translation practices onto colonial conflict, imperialism, and latter-­day forms of cultural domination, collusion, and opposition to domination. Many subaltern translation practices use the resources provided by the colonizer, but in a way that moves us beyond the dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, oppressor/oppressed, or Western domination / Native resistance (Liu 1995, 25). Instead we ask, with Shaden Tageldin (2011, 4), what happens “when a ‘native’ signifier binds to a ‘foreign’—­especially a colonizing—­signifier to shore up the power of the native through the power of the foreign.” These complex tactics of the subaltern translator hearken to other possible futures, cracking through the fissures of colonial modernity, as they perform a politics of configuration, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy (1993, 37–­38). As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has commented about the subversive strain in Mahasweta Devi’s stories (which Spivak has translated), “They must operate with the resources of a history shaped by colonization against the legacy of colonization” (Spivak 1995, 31). This “deconstructive embrace,” as Spivak terms Devi’s use of language, “is not only her message, but also her medium.” Translation as a struggle for control occurs in the legal realm, the literary realm, the scientific realm, and the academic realm. It involves the inculcation of racial and gender categories (Hannoum 2003; Lugones 2007, 2010, 2014; Oyěwùmí 1997).

16 Introduction

LIMITS OF EPISTEMICIDE An evaluative term such as epistemicide needs to be used with discernment: as with any other transaction involving language, translation as such, in the abstract, is neither intrinsically liberating nor intrinsically oppressive. When translators render texts or terms into other languages, or when terms are borrowed into other languages, sometimes they contribute to the flourishing of the receiving culture, sometimes they eclipse local concepts, sometimes they add a useful nuance, and sometimes they introduce a Trojan horse. Analysis involves identifying how a term or a text is located in a receiving culture vis-­à-­vis other terms and other signifiers, how those signifiers may have their own history of connection within a language or across languages by virtue of being paired together by translators, and more generally the various ways in which different languages and cultures are interconnected. Racialized words, for example, are often products of the oppressive structures to which they are connected, but they are also sometimes connected to or shaped by racialized subaltern people who use translation as an exercise of agency. In this vein, Brent Hayes Edwards writes of translation as “framing” concepts of race and Blackness: Edwards points out that through translation, the French nègre has been framed with or hinged to the words Black and Negro in English (2003, 38). Translation back and forth aligns and realigns these terms over time, leading us to see translation as a process of construction, the way carpentry involves placing a joint. Claiming the term nègre, investing it with particular signifying content, and then deploying it as a link to another context (using it to translate Negro, for instance) are clearly practices with implications that go beyond the “simply” linguistic. In a larger sense, these are all framing gestures. (38; emphasis in the original)

By calling them “framing” gestures, Edwards suggests that translating joins together words in different languages in a way that is consequential for both words—­and both fields. These translations

Introduction 17

do not just define the word nègre. They also frame it: positioning, delimiting, or extending its range of application; articulating it in relation to a discursive field, to a variety of derived or opposed signifiers (homme de couleur, noir); fleshing out its history of use; and imagining its scope of implication, its uses, its “future.” (38)

Edwards notes the way Gilbert Gratiant, Lamine Senghor, and Jane Nardal “wrench the term nègre into the service of anti-­imperialist alliances,” as well as recode other racialized words or coin neologisms to develop new notions of Blackness (Edwards 2003, 36–­37, 148). In these cases, people of African descent have fashioned and refashioned the sometimes oppressive meanings of these words as they have hitched and rehitched languages to each other. Achille Mbembe also theorizes the interconnections between understandings of Blackness across languages in his Critique de la raison nègre (2015, translated as Critique of Black Reason in 2017). His formulation complements Edwards’s insofar as it provides a history of translation practices that transcends comparative philology to become not just political philosophy but also a semiotics, a social history, and an ontology. Mbembe states that “neither Blackness nor race has ever been fixed. . . . They have, on the contrary, always belonged to a chain of open-­ended signifiers” (2017, 6). Both Edwards and Mbembe take up how Black, nègre, noir, and Negro have been joined together through translation, especially through the work of Black translators, and how the terms have consequently been interconnected over the centuries. They show how translated terms, including words that are racist in origin, can sometimes be deployed in the formation of transnational, transcultural movements against oppressive structures, even if those terms, and those movements, involve a certain amount of semantic ambiguity and complexity. Seeing how a term has been framed, in Edwards’s sense, serves as a counterbalance to a tendency to see Western power as unstoppable and other cultures as passive. On the other hand, without a theory of epistemicide, or something like it, one is not able to see the predations of imperial domination. We need both: a theory of power and a methodology to chart the interconnected growth and interactive change of terms and their translations through time.

18 Introduction

Epistemicide has other significant limits as a lens through which to view cultural domination. For example, the word itself emphasizes knowledge rather than being, epistemology rather than ontology. It represents knowing rather than doing. We will see that in some cases this distinction does not hold. The use of the term “epistemicide” is intended to draw attention to one aspect of genocide. Epistemicide is a kind of genocide, or an element of genocide, and sometimes a precondition for it. Epistemicide can occur through straightforward genocide or ethnocide (killing the knowers), but it can also be the result of other operations: a subordinate’s knowledge can be rendered nonsense (Hoagland 2002), or knowledge and knowers can be criminalized (Puar 2008). The examples herein document acts, practices, technologies, frameworks, and projects that have potentially epistemicidal effects—­some intentionally, and others unwittingly. Whether they are epistemicidal does not rest on intent. Total elimination or successful genocide, moreover, is not a necessary condition for identifying epistemicide or an attempt at epistemicide. Just as the eugenicist projects of sterilizing Puerto Rican women en masse were genocidal even if ultimately unsuccessful, just as the Third Reich attempted genocide but did not succeed in killing all Jews or Roma, so too can attempts at epistemicide, or epistemicidal projects, be unsuccessful and still be genocidal/epistemicidal. On the other hand, epistemicide is sometimes complete in just the way that genocide is sometimes complete. Indigenous languages throughout the world are endangered, and some are driven into extinction each year. When a language becomes extinct, the condition for the possibility of the unique knowledge associated with that language is also made extinct.

TRANSLATION AS ERASURE AND TRANSLATION AS STRUGGLE: A TYPOLOGY OF EPISTEMICIDE Several theorists have already taken up epistemicide as a tool to analyze how power works through translation (Bennett 2007, 2014; Vásquez 2011; see also Bordet 2016; Karnedi 2015). Karen Bennett notes the global dominion of English in contemporary academic journals and in academic publishing, such that it has become a scholarly lingua

Introduction 19

franca. As Lillis et al. (2010, 131) have commented, “English cannot be viewed as a transparent medium, simply ‘translating’ knowledge from one language to another; its status within global evaluation systems is actually shaping what gets counted as knowledge.” Bennett shows how a style of logic and argument common among contemporary Portuguese scholars, influenced by centuries of Jesuit scholasticism, has to be flattened and reworked by translators in order to be presented in the simple, supposedly transparent declarative sentences and syllogistic logic Anglo-­American positivists favor (Bennett 2007, 163). She calls this epistemicide. While Bennett is no doubt correct that English has come to exercise global hegemony in academic discourse, she does not pay attention to the proliferation of counterhegemonic Englishes (Kothari and Snell 2012; Mazrui and Mazrui 1998; Mazrui 2019). Bennett also tends to assume that the original text has an intrinsic meaning, and epistemicide for her is the corruption or erasure of that original meaning. Since I do not believe a text has an essential meaning, I shift the focus and look instead at how translation is used to destroy a target culture, or plunder the resources of the source or original culture—­the epistemicide is at a social or cultural level, and not in the meaning or semantic content of a text (see Venuti 2019, 58). In other cases, the epistemicide lies in marginalizing or criminalizing the translated text, the subaltern translator, the language, or the nondominant culture from which those words or translators are drawn. In a brilliant article, Rolando Vásquez has observed that colonizers have used translation “to incorporate knowledge within the borders of intelligibility and  .  .  . to erase the knowledge of the colonized” (2011, 27). This binary—­incorporating or erasing subaltern knowledge—­serves as a useful shorthand to help understand epistemicide in the Americas. Working through case studies—­seeing how translations are refracted across languages—­allows us to further refine this distinction, go beyond the binary, and add to the inventory of translation techniques colonizers have used from that early colonial period through the war on terror. A taxonomy of epistemicide makes this point a bit more concrete. The following chapters will provide such a taxonomy or typology. In some of these cases, epistemicide is the implicit or explicit goal; in other cases, epistemicide is a tactic, method, or effect of cultural domination. The final two chapters focus on decolonial methodologies of translation.

20 Introduction

CHAPTER SUMMARIES Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries in the early colonial period followed a religious injunction to evangelize. In order to do so, they developed a set of linguistic tools, including grammars of many Indigenous languages, and put together glossaries, the basis of what would develop into the first bilingual dictionaries in the Americas. Chapter 1 considers some of the epistemic, racial, and practical consequences of the production of these colonial-­era bilingual dictionaries. Even though Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish are all called “languages,” they may have different, even incommensurate epistemological and ontological statuses for their speakers. Mario Vilca, Lee Maracle, and José María Arguedas (to whom I return in the following chapter) all make this point about the incommensurability of different “languages.” These early bilingual dictionaries do not countenance these various Indigenous understandings of language itself. Instead, dictionaries grind the incommensurate languages and worldviews into commensuration. Forced commensuration is an operation of epistemicide. In order to illuminate some of the basic terms of a decolonial translation theory, chapter 2 takes up Peruvian anthropologist José María Arguedas’s essay “The Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish” (1939). The terms of translation theory can be changed by paying attention to the “replies” to European modernity made from outside of Europe, especially those replies that come as theory from the colonized. Reading Arguedas’s essay contrapuntally to Walter Benjamin’s canonical “The Task of the Translator” ([1923] 1969) throws into relief the critical difference of Arguedas’s decolonial methodology. Nevertheless, Arguedas’s work has not been given the platform that Benjamin’s essay has. Ignoring Arguedas’s work is an example of epistemic marginalization. After focusing in the first chapters on the mechanisms of Spanish expansion and domination, in chapters 3 and 4 I turn to epistemicide in the present day by looking at contemporary U.S. imperial ambitions. As part of the war on terror, a number of Arab American and Latinx translators and interpreters have been caught up in the criminal justice system in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has monitored, detained, and prosecuted them for their work as translators. Criminalizing translators, criminalizing the act of translating itself, and

Introduction 21

criminalizing the knowledge or information in their translations represent contemporary forms of epistemicide. Tarek Mehanna and Mohamed Yousry both served prison time for translating texts (as of this writing, Mehanna is still in prison). In a third case, Erik Camayd-­Freixas, a federal court interpreter caught up in court proceedings he felt were fundamentally unjust, wrote an exposé denouncing the government’s attempts to criminalize undocumented workers as part of the war on terror. The analysis of these cases in chapter 3 tells us something about contemporary state tactics to control competing narratives of state power and intimidate translators and interpreters through selective prosecution that rests on racist tropes. State actors, moreover, try to control exactly how translation is to be performed and to force translators to be obedient to epistemicidal rather than liberatory logics.4 These cases reflect ongoing historical processes of imperialism and racial domination. In chapter 4, I take up an instance of potential epistemicide in the academic sphere. From the beginning, the nascent academic field of performance studies has studied a broad spectrum of performance-­related activity (Schechner 2010). Some performance studies scholars worry that a prevalence of Anglophone theorizing in performance studies, combined with this omnivorous approach to the study of other cultures and traditions, can lead to intellectual imperialism (Rae 2011; Reinelt 2007). Taking as a point of departure the (non)translation of the word and concept “performance” in Latin America, this chapter explores whether performance studies is involved in a kind of academic piracy insofar as it draws on cultural and artistic production in Latin America and elsewhere to feed and therefore reinforce U.S. and Anglophone intellectual hegemony. In the following chapter, I present a decolonial methodology. A “stereoscopic” reading, writes theorist Marilyn Gaddis Rose, involves reading a text alongside its translation. The methodology of stereoscopic reading can be a decolonial methodology if it is applied at points of difference in power. Stereoscopic readings can provide critical insight into exchanges and translations that amount to epistemicide. Furthermore, stereoscopic readings at these nodal moments of tense encounters can potentially be more than merely interpretive: they can have a transformative effect. 4. I thank Matthew Gleeson for the formulation.

22 Introduction

Contemporary Latinx queer theorists Rick Santos and Ernesto Martínez each provide examples of stereoscopic reading as political intervention. As theorists who are simultaneously cultural actors and cultural translators, they interact with and affect cultures, languages, and politics as they translate, interpret, and theorize the dangerous intersections of cultures in conflict at points of colonial predation and the policing of subaltern and racialized masculinity. The conclusion outlines the contours of an approach to translation that does not engage in epistemicide. I take the term desnudo from the early chronicler Cabeza de Vaca ([1542] 2004, [1542] 2002; see also Stavans 2002). As a member of a shipwrecked crew of would-­be colonizers, Cabeza de Vaca describes himself as “desnudo” or naked. For Cabeza de Vaca, “desnudo” comes to connote, not merely physical nakedness, but beyond that a general vulnerability when one is immersed in another reality, playing by another’s terms with which one is scarcely familiar. He is unsure how to proceed, stripped of his armor and stratagem. I take up this expanded, metaphorical sense of “desnudo” as a helpful decolonial posture. In this context, the condition of desnudez (nakedness) implies a certain epistemic humility that I describe as bewilderment, an attitude or disposition that is a healthy alternative to cultural imperialism. Desnudez/bewilderment is a potentially creative position. Several examples illustrate decolonial translation projects in which the translation is made for an incipient, uncertain future of which we can only discern the outline.

CHAPTER 1 COLONIZATION AND COMMENSURATION Asymmetries in the Making of Bilingual Dictionaries

THE CONTEMPORARY BILINGUAL DICTIONARY IS an everyday technology for making incommensurate languages and worldviews commensurate. In fact, this characteristic—­grinding down two worldviews to the point where they can be compared—­seen in terms of its colonial origin, gives a clue to how early colonial missionaries perceived difference and then built inequality into the differences between themselves and Indigenous people, whose languages most of the missionaries viewed as faulty and deficient. The first bilingual dictionaries in our modern sense—­that is, between two living languages (rather than, say, between a classical language such as Latin and a living language)—­were confected during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican friars working in Indigenous communities throughout the Americas. In the decades after 1547, Andrés de Olmos, Domingo de Santo Tomás, Juan Baptista de Lagunas, Ludovico Bertonio, Maturino Gilberti, and others each published a bilingual dictionary or vocabulario of Spanish paired with Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, and other languages of the New World.1 1. Vocabulario is the term they used to refer to what today would be called a dictionary, in this case a bilingual dictionary. Correspondingly, in this chapter, I use vocabulary, vocabulario,

24 Chapter 1

Many of these books predate the earliest modern dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611) (see Calvo Pérez 1997, 257–­58). As a product of first contact, these bilingual dictionaries tethered together for the first time the language of the Spanish dominators and the various languages of the conquered peoples. Their explicit purpose was to enable Castilian or Spanish speakers to carry out effective missionary work. In their introductions, dedicatorias, and prefaces to this first generation of dictionaries (between, roughly, 1547 and 1624), Bertonio, Lagunas, Luis de Valdivia, and others described a religious injunction to bring the word of God to Indigenous people. For example, the Jesuit Diego Gonçález Holguín wrote in the dedication to his Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua o del Inca in 1608 that his aim was to aid in the formation of those who could proselytize to the Quechua people in Quechua: La causa y intento Señor que me mouio a componer este vocabulario y arte, este mismo me impele y fuerça a ofrecer a v. merced este pequeño seruicio, y dedicarle los trabajos y vigilias que en el he puesto para que por mano de v. merced con su fauor y amparo mas felizmente alcance mi intento, y el de esta obra que es ayudar a formar ministros del Euangelio para los indios, dandoles la copia y propriedad de la lengua que faltaua, conque no tengan ya alguna excusa para no predicar. ([1608] 2007, 35) (The reason and intention, Señor, that moves me to compose this Vocabulary and Art, is the same purpose that compels me to offer to Your Majesty this small service, and to dedicate these works and studies so that with your support and assistance I shall be able to accomplish my goal and that of this project, which is to help in the formation of those who can evangelize the Indians, giving the missionaries the language they lack, so that they have no excuse not to preach.)2

Gonçález Holguín and his peers also developed grammars, as well as other kinds of instructional and liturgical texts, such as catechisms, books bilingual dictionary, and dictionary interchangeably. 2. Unless otherwise noted, in this chapter all translations are mine.

Colonization and Commensuration  25

of sermons, primers on how to make a confession, and similar didactic texts intended to enlighten the Indigenous nations in Catholic truths and to habituate them to Catholic rituals and practices. They meticulously translated these works into Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, and eventually Purépecha, Mapudungun, Guaraní, and other languages, working with teams of Indigenous language experts, assistants, and informants. Besides aiding in missionary work, the priests who created and used these dictionaries gave other reasons for standardizing Indigenous languages and rendering them in written form. Dominican fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, in his Lexicon, o Vocabulario de la lengua general del Peru of 1560, one of the first bilingual dictionaries, justified standardizing Quechua to make it more amenable to the purposes of colonial administration: the vast area that had been controlled by the Inca, now claimed as part of the Spanish empire, was home to many local variants of Quechua, contemporaneous records suggest (Santo Tomás 1560; Moya 1993; Durston 2007). This strategy of language learning and translation was controversial among the colonizers: royal authorities and some elements of the church, while convinced of the need to convert their new subjects to Catholicism, would have preferred that missionary work be conducted in Spanish; after 1577, they insisted on it. That was the year the Holy Office of the Inquisition and King Philip II started confiscating texts written in any of the languages autochthonous to the Americas, though this was an uneven process and subject to subsequent reversal and exception. Some church officials worried that Christian missionaries who studied non-­Christian worldviews were in effect encouraging false beliefs. They were also suspicious of possible heresies camouflaged in tongues that seemed so strange. Other civil and religious authorities questioned the need to study a language spoken by people whose intellectual capacity they doubted. The edicts and decrees that emerged from the Council of Trent, the Council of the Indies, and sundry papal and royal authorities restricting the publication of texts in Indigenous languages posed an ongoing practical challenge for the compilers of the vocabularios since they had to shepherd their manuscripts through the ecclesiastical structure and receive royal imprimatur in order to be published and distributed. Bernardino de Sahagún’s careful documentation of Nahua beliefs was seized by his

26 Chapter 1

church superiors at different points; at another point he was required to submit Spanish translations of all his writings in Nahuatl. Perhaps this is one reason the learned frays left such elaborate justifications for why their lexicographic work was a necessary and important part of the larger evangelical project.3 In this contentious political environment, the dictionaries embodied a series of tensions, some of which point to paradoxes about the very nature of colonialism.

1. The missionaries assembled the dictionaries based on one-­to-­one equivalences between Spanish words and words in the respective Indigenous languages, yet most of the missionaries also argued for, and presupposed, a linguistic and cultural asymmetry.



2. In particular, the vocabularios glued two worldviews together hierarchically in a way that favored a Christian cosmology, an emerging Renaissance humanism, and an incipient universalist understanding of the human, even as many of the missionaries racialized language in such a way that they both recognized the humanity of Indigenous people and depicted them as intrinsically inferior (see Wynter 2003, 288).



3. The authors coined numerous hybrid neologisms in Spanish and in the respective Indigenous languages that fused Indigenous and European ideas, even as the dictionaries fixed the languages as dichotomous.



4. These religious lexicographers generally made the assumption that “language” for both parties marked the same domain. The vocabulario was predicated on that logic. However, what some Indigenous peoples called, and call, language had a different, even incommensurate, epistemological and ontological status from the status of “language” for the

3. The stakes were high. The clerics witnessed and sometimes participated in the ongoing whirlwind of violence, genocide, torture, and enslavement of Indigenous people that constituted the Conquest. To take one example among countless others, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico (later archbishop), sometimes portrayed in the secondary literature as a defender of the Nahua people, argued for removing small children from their families to be raised among Christians (Ríos Castaño 2012, 33); as apostolic inquisitor, he presided over the trials of dozens of Indigenous people for blasphemy, bigamy, and idolatry. His highest-­profile case was probably that of don Carlos Ometochtzin, an Indigenous leader burned at the stake for heresy in 1539 (Ríos Castaño 2012, 27). Bernardino de Sahagún and Alonso de Molina served as interpreters during the trial at Zumárraga’s request (León-­Portilla 2002, 101–­3).

Colonization and Commensuration  27

Spaniards. Some languages are constitutively incommensurate, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Raz (1986, 353; and see below). To think they could be made commensurate was to misunderstand the very nature of the differences in the role of language in different cultures.

The dictionaries thus represent dynamism and stasis: they were part of the locomotion for mutual transformation even as they helped create and cement a hierarchical relationship. The rest of this chapter explores these interrelated claims. In the varied texts they prepared, the Spanish, French, and Italian missionaries tended to frame the differences between themselves and the various Indigenous nations in binary terms. The dictionaries were structured in terms of an “us” and a “them”: “our” sacred Christian truths versus “their” diabolic idolatries, “our” Mass, liturgy, and God versus “their” weird customs and pagan spirits. Some also framed this temporally: a “before,” when the Indigenous people were idolatrous, and a “now,” post-­ Conquest, with Christian hegemony firmly in place (see below). The binary was part of the structure of thinking implicit in the colonization of knowledge. But the cultures and languages began to mix immediately, in part because of the coercion and violence of the Conquest. Dot Tuer, in her analysis of a later missionary, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, author of Tesoro de la lengua guarani (1639) and Arte y vocabulario de la lengua guarani, ó mas bien tupi (1640), captures this tension between the Christian view, predicated on dichotomy, and the hybrid reality. While Montoya’s and other Jesuit texts obviously view indigenous culture through the veil of Christian eyes (particularly in the Manichean division of the world into the true God and the pagan demons), what bleeds through this absolute conviction is the degree to which evangelization was subject to a negotiation between the spiritual realms of the Christian and the Guaraní. (Tuer 2003, 79)

Tuer shows how material engagements and entanglements meant that, despite this Manichean division, Montoya’s text “provides insights into the cultural dimension of the colonial periphery as a contact zone in which a blurring of boundaries between saintly conversion and shamanistic resistance occurs” (79).

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The linguistic and cosmological dichotomy or binary that provided the axis for the bilingual dictionary was also contradicted by the activity of legions of Indigenous people, many of them scholars and sages in their own right, who participated at various stages in the research, interpretation, and writing that went into the vocabularios and other texts. Indigenous and mestizx people came to use the new linguistic and semiotic tools supplied—­or more accurately foisted upon them—­by the Spaniards. Frances Karttunen provides an example from the Mayan context: When they engaged boys like Gaspar Antonio as assistants in compiling grammars and dictionaries of Maya and adapting the Roman alphabet for writing the language, they had catechisms and sermons in mind. . . . What the friars did not count on was that their [Mayan] school boys would appropriate what they learned to Maya uses. . . . After the graduates of the Franciscan schools left the friars to serve as chapel masters, some of them used their skills in the new kind of writing to transcribe what was written in the Mayas’ own hieroglyphic books. They also taught others to read and write in the new way, and Maya leaders took to communicating with each other by letter. (1994, 94)

Although the focus of this chapter is the production of the bilingual dictionaries, this larger context of Indigenous scholarship and emerging culture of writing is a pivotal backdrop. Such extraordinary works as the Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh were written by Mayans after the Conquest. In those texts, one can see the transculturation of semiotic systems and cosmologies—­cultures of the written word and the book combining with Indigenous understandings of the orientation of space and symbols, as well as elements of both linear and nonlinear narrative techniques. Many of the seminal texts of the emerging hybrid or heterogeneous worldviews written by people of Indigenous or mestizx background took up Mayan and Nahua philosophies or Quechua and other Indigenous languages and ideas. These authors and chroniclers include Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc, Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and the stupendous figure of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, whose evocative drawings tell a narrative of the Conquest in

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a way that integrated Western representational conventions from the period with Quechua ordering of the constellations. The resulting intellectual and linguistic heterogeneity—­Eurocentric thinking and a range of Indigenous philosophies—­was evident in their final texts.

PARADOXES OF EARLY COLONIAL PHILOLOGY One way to analyze the construction of the colonial binary on which the bilingual dictionaries hinged is to review the conditions of the research and interpretation that went into them.4 The European friars who conceived and executed these early bilingual dictionaries were dedicated students of Indigenous languages and customs. They immersed themselves for decades in charting and committing to paper Indigenous histories, mythologies, and ritual practices. Historian and philologist Miguel León-­Portilla called Fray Bernardino de Sahagún the “first anthropologist,” while Victoria Ríos Castaño has described him as a cultural translator (León-­Portilla 1999, 2002; Ríos Castaño 2014; see also Klor de Alva 1988; Solodkow 2010). Félix Layme has similarly referred to Italian Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio, a scrupulous scholar of Aymara, as an ethnographer (Layme 1984, 59; see also Valdeón 2014, 5–­10). Fray Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía, has also been called a “notable ethnographer” (Janick and Tucker 2018, 73). This framing has been contested. Historian Edmundo O’Gorman (1978, 448) has mocked the idea that Sahagún or Motolinía were ethnographers, given their commitment to Christian evangelism.5 O’Gorman also pointed out the obvious anachronism of 4. I have already mentioned some of the ecclesiastical authorities and imperial institutions that controlled the books’ subsequent circulation or dissemination—­or blocked their circulation. 5. O’Gorman’s skepticism finds a strong basis within Sahagún’s own writings. Sahagún railed against the popular devotion to the Virgen de Guadalupe that was then emerging on the Hill of Tepeyac, insisting it was simply a cult to Tonantzin that should be suppressed (Sahagún [1577] 1982, 38). Disturbingly, Sahagún also wrote of his approval of young Nahua men he had trained at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco who destroyed Nahua pyramids and went out at night to spy on or otherwise observe, arrest, and punish other Nahua people for continuing traditional festivals (79–­80). These remarks should not be minimized as mere rhetorical slips. Rather, they seem consistent with Sahagún’s general sensibility and

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referring to these figures as ethnographers (448). Some scholars have made the argument that many of these missionaries became strange, hybrid transcultural subjects (Tuer 2010). Though exceptional in many ways, Sahagún’s method of working illustrates both a meticulous approach to documenting Nahua cultures and the tensions implicit in the philological enterprise that all the authors of the bilingual dictionaries faced in one way or another. Sahagún (1499–­ 1590) arrived in New Spain in 1529, just eight years after the fall of Tenochtitlan and after the arrival of Juan de Zumárraga, Bartolomé de las Casas, and others who would play such important, if controversial, roles in setting up missions, advocating for Indigenous people, and negotiating with their peers, the Crown, and Indigenous community leaders. Sahagún taught at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (inaugurated in 1536), often credited as the first institution of higher learning established by Europeans in the Americas. The Colegio educated the sons of caciques and other Nahua elites in the Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl languages, as well as in Christian doctrine, philosophy, and other subjects. Two of his colleagues at the Colegio, the Franciscans Andrés de Olmos (1485–­1571) and Alonso de Molina (1514?–­1585), would go on to publish important early vocabularios and grammars. Students and alumni of the Colegio were integral in the research, writing, and translating of Sahagún’s monumental Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, and in translating from Spanish orientation. He justified his twelve-­volume work on the Nahuas, for example, with the metaphor that he was a physician looking to diagnose the depth of the (spiritual) disease in order to provide a proper cure: El medico no puede acertadamente aplicar las medicinas al enfermo sin que primero conozca: de qué humor, o de qué causa proçede la enfermedad; de manera que el buen medico conuiene sea docto en el conocimiento de las mediçinas y en el de las enfermedades para aplicar conueniblemente a cada enfermedad la mediçina contraria. Los predicadores, y confesores, medicos son de las animas para curar las enfermedades espirituales: conuiene tengã esperitia de las mediçinas y de las enfermedades espirituales. (Sahagún [1577] 1982, first paragraph of book 1, p. 45) (A physician cannot administer medicine correctly to the patient without first knowing what causes the disease or from which humor it is derived. Thus, a good medical doctor should be an expert in medicine and in illness in order to apply the right medicine. Preachers and confessors are doctors of the spirit, and so to cure spiritual sickness it is advisable that they have experience in spiritual medicine and spiritual disease.) (translation mine) The medical metaphor of priest-­as-­spiritual-­healer was a trope for Sahagún and others. In book 7 of his work, on Nahua astrology and “natural philosophy,” Sahagún referred to his motivation for documenting Nahua beliefs as “healing spiritual blindness.”

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to Nahuatl his Psalmodia Christiana (1583) and other works on Christian doctrine, as well as interpreting for him, writing down the fruits of his field research, and helping him prepare his Arte y vocabulario (now lost). Indeed, Lourdes Arencibia Rodríguez goes so far as to refer to the Colegio as “the first major school of interpreters and translators in the New World” (Arencibia Rodríguez 2006, 263). Sahagún developed a comparative method, measuring beliefs, songs, narratives, and concepts gathered in one place against those gathered in another, to develop a more nuanced sense of the range and variation of Nahua cultural practices. Sahagún made a point of naming his collaborators: Y en todos estos escrutinjos, vuo gramaticos colegiales. El principal y mas sabio, fue antonjo valeriano vezino de azcaputzalco: otro poco menos, que este fue alonso vegerano, vezino de quauhtitlan: otro fue martin Jacobita, de que arriba hize mencion: otro pedro de san buenauentura, vezino de quauhtitlan: todos espertos en tres lenguas, latina, espafiola y indiana, los escriuanos, que sacaron de buena letra, todas las obras, son: Diego de grado, vezino del tlatilulco, del barrjo de la conception. Bonifacio maximjliano, vezino del tlatilulco, del barrjo de sanct martin. Matheo seuerino, vezino de suchimjlco, de la parte de vllac. (Sahagún [1577] 1982, 55) (And in all these scrutinies there were grammarians from the Colegio. The principal and wisest one was Antonio Valeriano, a native of Azcaputzalco; another, a little less so, was Alonso Vegerano, a native of Quauhtitlan. Another was Martín Jacobita, of whom I made mention above; another was Pedro de San Buenaventura, a native of Quauhtitlan. All were expert in three languages: Latin, Spanish, and Indian [sic]. The scribes who copied all the works in a good hand are Diego de Grado, native of the district of La Concepción in Tlatilulco; Bonifacio Maximiliano, native of the district of San Martín in Tlatilulco; Mateo Severino, native of Xochimilco, near Ullac.) (translation in Sahagún [1577] 1982, 55)

Sahagún was unusual in emphasizing in his writings the important roles played by these scholars of Nahua descent. Antonio Valeriano

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(1520–­1605) would go on to have an illustrious career as a scholar and politician; authorship of the Nican Mopohua is often attributed to him. Martín Jacobita served as rector of the Colegio. Sahagún’s scholarly rigor leads back to the question: Was he a proto-­ anthropologist, as León-­Portilla and others claim? On one side of the balance, he merits recognition for his conscientious methodology and documentation of Nahua thinking, systems of classifying nature, ritual, and history of the past (including the recent past of the Conquest itself ). Nevertheless, León-­Portilla concludes, “above all else” Sahagún “was a Franciscan missionary” (por encima de todo, era un misionero franciscano) (1999, 1). Sahagún equivocated on this very question. At the beginning of his magnum opus, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, whose definitive version is often referred to as the Florentine Codex, Sahagún stated that his aim was to investigate the “human, natural and divine things” of Nueva España. But, as León-­Portilla points out, Sahagún immediately corrected himself and added, “or better said, the idolatrous things” (las cosas diuinas o por mejor dezir ydolatricas y humanas y naturales desta nueua españa) (Sahagún [1577] 1982, 46; León-­Portilla 2002, 23–­24). Just like many of his missionary colleagues, Sahagún alternately praised and condemned Indigenous beliefs. In most of these contemporaneous bilingual dictionaries, one comes across versions of this contradiction over and over. Although these priests generally allude, almost despite themselves, to the subtlety, power, and delicacy of Indigenous speech, many also speak with derision of Indigenous beliefs, shamans, and so on. In some cases, the disdain shades into scorn for the speakers as well. Ludovico Bertonio’s Vocabulario de la lengua aymara (1612) is peppered with the disrespectful language he often used to refer to the Aymara people: Los indios son tan mal habituados, tan llenos de espinas y abrojos sus corazones que la semilla de la divina palabra que en ellos se siembra no puede fructificar, y finalmente, que es tiempo perdido el cultivar esta gente. (Bertonio [1612] 2011, 44)

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(The Indians have such bad tendencies, and their hearts are so full of thorns and thistles, that one cannot harvest the seed of the divine word in them, and ultimately, cultivating these people is a waste of time.)

Although he devoted himself for decades to Aymara, Bertonio complained that the speakers were not capable of the kind of abstract thought Europeans were. They were childlike, of limited intellectual capacity, and uncultivated. Bertonio tended to conceive of the Aymara people as “simple communicators,” to use Gabriela Veronelli’s phrase (2012, 2015); like many of his contemporaries, he saw the Native people as brutes, barely capable of following orders. Pero no son éstas las mayores dificultades que se hallan en aprender esta lengua. Otras hay mayores que suelen entibiar mucho aún a los que se sujetan de buena gana al trabajo. La una es la poca capacidad que echan de ver en los indios. (Bertonio [1612] 2011, 44) (But these are not the biggest difficulties one finds in learning this language. Other difficulties, even larger, would dampen the enthusiasm of anyone working hard to master the language. One difficulty is the limited potential one sees in the Indians.)

This dualistic view of Indigenous languages, as conceptually rich but also deficient and unstable, and dualistic view of the people, as full of thorns but also possessing souls deserving the divine word, set up a contradiction between the descriptive aim of their glossaries and the prescriptive goals implicit in the administrative ambition of standardizing the Indigenous languages and the missionary project of conversion.

RACE AND IDOLATRY In order to understand this paradox—­dehumanizing people while trying to convert them for the sake of their souls, scrupulously studying and documenting their languages while belittling them and trying to destroy their cultures—­a brief detour is needed. Bertonio’s ambivalence situates

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him somewhere along a European continuum that racialized language. At one pole, the fiery orator Antonio de Montesinos, his more famous disciple Bartolomé de las Casas—­often called the first human rights activist—­and the studious Andrés de Olmos all seemed to recognize in the various Indigenous peoples a humanity and capacity as full as their own. At the other pole, the notorious figure of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in his disputation with Bartolomé de las Casas, put forward an Aristotelian argument for the inherent inferiority and slave-­like characteristics of the people of the New World. Somewhere in between stood figures, Bertonio and Domingo de Betanzos among them, who did not so much wholly dehumanize Indigenous people as ascribe to them a limited, reduced humanity, a humanity they nonetheless clearly recognized: the missionaries, after all, did not try and convert deer, beavers, stones, or rivers. Some drew a binary between, on the one hand, Christians who were divinely inspired and fully human, and who enjoyed the full recognition of the majesty of Castile, and, on the other hand, the Caliban-­like figure of the native.6 Despite their differences, for these clergymen, one language, variously referred to as Spanish, Castilian, Christian, or Romance, had the essence of the knowledge of the Lord and the sacraments that was absent in the languages indigenous to the newly acquired lands.7 These Iberian priests and their contemporaries tended to associate or link Spanish, the Word of God, and race. Catholic Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took these elements as a sort of gestalt—­in their minds, language and religion tended to merge with bloodlines, cultural characteristics, group identity, and the body. So, for example, the critically minded naval pilot Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca referred to other Spaniards he encountered as “Christians,” even when they were engaging in behavior he found un-­Christian (enslaving and massacring Native people, stealing their things: see Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 2002; see also the conclusion). 6. Sylvia Wynter sees the emergence of race at this Rubicon. She attributes the particular contours of what counts as “human” to a clash between two European or Eurocentric paradigms: the theocentric viewpoints espoused by the Catholic Church and the budding of Renaissance humanist views of human rationality (2003, 288). 7. These missionaries were mostly from the Iberian Peninsula, where the kingdom of Castile was acquiring political hegemony over the area that would become “Spain”; thus, I will follow the practice of using Spanish and Castilian interchangeably throughout.

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In his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ([1552] 2015), Bartolomé de las Casas denounced his compatriots for such a broad catalogue of atrocities that his use of “cristianos” sounds almost ironic. Cervantes, circa 1605, had a character refer to the language of the Spaniards as “cristiano,” in contrast to the language of the North African Moors. There is other evidence that language and religion mixed with blood or bloodline, language, belief, and being. In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), Sebastián de Covarrubias wrote under the entry for “raza” (race), “En los linages se toma en mala parte, como tener alguna raza de Moro, o Iudio” (In bloodlines, race is taken disparagingly to refer to Moors [Muslims] or Jews). Jews were for Covarrubias not only a cultural group that espoused certain religious dogmas. They were a race. Moreover, in his Suplemento, Covarrubias described Jews as having an innate cultural tendency toward sedition and perfidy from the time they supposedly sold Jesus to the Romans through their centuries-­long stay in the Iberian Peninsula (Covarrubias 2001; see also Reyre 1994). Contextual clues in his Tesoro suggest he harbored similar prejudices toward Muslims. Thus, Covarrubias wrote that “Moriscos” were “los conuertidos de moros a la Fe Catolica, y fi ellos fon Catolicos gran merced les ha hecho Dios, y a nosotros tambien” (Moorish converts to the Catholic faith, and if they are Catholics, God has done them a great mercy, and us as well) (1611, 556r). Covarrubias saw Moorish converts as different from other Catholics, and that is why they had a different name (Moriscos) and why he drew a distinction between “them” and “us” (i.e., Catholics by birth, and not descended from Moors). If there was any doubt about Covarrubias fusing race and religion, part of his definition of “Moros” in his Tesoro is that they celebrate Ramadan. The point of emergence of a modern concept of race is the subject of some scholarly dispute (see, for example, Quijano 1992, 2007; Jordan 2012; C. Robinson 1983; Wolfe 2006, 387; Lowe 2015; Stam and Shohat 2012, 2–­3; Vacano 2012). Many argue that it emerged precisely at the onset of the Conquest. Without gainsaying that view, suffice it for our purposes to say that something like a racial, or perhaps protoracial, distinction based on blood and what we would now call religion was already present in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and served as one of the justifications for the Reconquista. As Nasar Meer has put it, “The category of race was co-­constituted with religion” (2013, 389). This

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would explain some of the more arcane procedures and distinctions of the Inquisition and the Expulsion, including the test for limpieza de sangre and the difference between “Old Christians” and “New Christians,” “moriscos,” or “marranos.”

BRINGING THE WORD OF GOD This backdrop provides a way to understand how Bertonio saw Indigenous people as not simply spiritually impoverished but also slothful, and possessing languages that were faulty vessels.8 As we have seen, not all missionaries saw Indigenous people this way. Sahagún’s colleagues at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the gifted linguists Alonso de Molina and Andrés de Olmos, shared with Sahagún, and maybe even inspired in him, an appreciation of Nahuatl. Whatever the differences among them, the missionaries’ intellectual vigor to learn Indigenous languages was stimulated at least in part by zeal to raise the people from their putative ignorance into the embrace of Christ and the church. The dynamism inherent in this description-­ prescription dialectic (describing the language in order to convert the people and change their beliefs) is the engine for the epistemicidal operation of yoking together the colonial and Indigenous tongues. Fray Diego Gonçález Holguín took the study of Indigenous language and culture, and the compiling of dictionaries, to be a preeminently moral activity sanctioned by the Crown and the pope. In his Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qqichua o del Inca, he proposed a vivid analogy to explain the awesome challenge: Por que yo Señor tengo por cosa la mas graue del Perú, y digna de gran ponderacion y de grauissimo escrupulo que no se predique y que las 8. In a similar vein, the influential fray Domingo de Betanzos was against the establishment of educational institutions such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, since he did not believe that Indigenous people could benefit from an education, even as he supported a papal bull against enslaving them. These examples could be multiplied. Fray Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinía, took an intense interest in the Nahuas and defended them, but wrote letters to the king that defended the Conquest and were critical of Bartolomé de las Casas ( Janick and Tucker 2018, 73; Baudot 1990, 13–­17; León-­Portilla 2002, 74–­78).

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almas de estos pobres indios en la mayor parte del Peru mueran de hambre. Dezimos que mueren en sus idolatrías y de qué mueren? De hambre de la palabra de Dios. . . . Como si vn padre de muchos hijos chiquitos aunque le piden pan no se lo quisiese dar . . . ; que cruel padre sera esse si los indios mueren en sus ydolatrias y pecados quien los mata sino los superiores? (Gonçález Holguín [1608] 2007, 35) (For I believe, milord, that it is of the utmost seriousness and worth pondering meticulously, that in most of Peru we do not evangelize and thus the souls of these poor Indians die of hunger. We say they die in idol worship, but of what do they die? Of hunger for the word of God. . . . It is as if a father of many young children, although they ask him for bread, does not want to give it to them. . . . What a cruel father that would be if the Indians die in their idolatry and sin, and who killed them if not the [religious] superiors?)

For Gonçález Holguín, bread is the word of God. “If the priest cannot open his mouth and evangelize in the language of the people, how can he give them this bread? . . . If he cannot give him this bread and sustenance, he cannot even serve as their priest” (El que no puede abrir la boca para predicarles en su lengua como puede darles este pan . . . ni puede ser su sacerdote el que no les puede dar su pan y sustento) (35). He concludes with a terrible and weighty calculus: to withhold bread from a poor person dying of hunger is to commit murder, but a worse murder is soul-­murder (“mayor homicida es el de las almas”). Who would deny a starving soul the word of God? Gonçález Holguín communicates urgency when he speculates on the sheer number of souls lost in Peru. Bertonio used a less lofty metaphor to communicate the same moral responsibility: “Confesemos pues que no tienen toda la culpa los indios si aprovechan tan poco en la doctrina evangélica, pues procede también del descuido que nosotros tenemos en enseñarles” (We must admit that we can’t blame the Indians entirely for taking so little advantage of the Christian doctrine, for it also stems from the carelessness with which we teach them) (Bertonio [1612] 2011, 46). Bringing the word of God to the Aymara therefore implied a translation project. Bertonio, in the preface to his Vocabulario, wrote:

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El principal intento que tuve (Sacerdotes en Cristo) en sacar a luz este Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara (dejando aparte la Gloria de su divina Magestad, que es el primer blanco a que deben mirar todas nuestras obras) fue acudir al buen deseo, que vuestras mercedes tienen de saber hablar congruamente a los indios de sus doctrinas; para quitar de sus entendimientos las tinieblas de ignorancia en las cosas de su salvación y enseñarles los misterios de nuestra católica religión. ([1612] 2011, 35) (The principal goal I had, Brothers in Christ, in producing this Dictionary of Aymara—­leaving aside the Glory of his divine Majesty, which should be the primary target of all our work—­is to help with the justified desire that you have to speak properly to the Indians of the doctrines, in order to remove the darkness of ignorance from their understanding in the things related to their salvation and to teach them the mysteries of our Catholic religion.)

Other missionary-­scholars voiced similar intentions. Juan Baptista de Lagunas prefaced his Arte y diccionario, con otras obras, en lengua Michuacana in 1574: Pretendemos declarar y administrar tan altos ministerios a estos naturales según son dóciles, cuya salvación o perdición pende de los ministros evangélicos, no es razón que la lengua se sepa superficialmente. (Lagunas 1574, 19) (Because we are trying to teach and minister to these native peoples, given that they are docile, and whose salvation or perdition depends on the evangelical ministries, it is not enough to know the language superficially.)

Using a similar, though more explicitly instrumental, justification, Padre Luis de Valdivia hoped his Arte y gramática general de la lengua que corre en todo el Reyno de Chile con un vocabulario, y confessionario (1606) would be effective in pacifying the Indigenous people of Chile. In practical terms, using the dictionary for proselytizing implied a method of selection. Bertonio wrote that he included especially those

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Aymara words that would further the end of teaching the “sacred mysteries” of Catholicism. Y teniendo eso por fin de este mi trabajo, pareciome cosa excusada tomar por asunto juntar a este libro todos los vocablos, que las dos lenguas Española y Aymara tienen. Lo uno porque son tantos que en muchos años no pudieran agotarse. Lo otro, porque no es necesario saberlos todos para enseñar nuestros sagrados misterios. (Bertonio [1612] 2011, 43) (And having this end in mind for my work, it seemed to me that I could be excused from pulling together all the words Spanish and Aymara have. The former because Spanish words are so numerous that in many years one would not run out of them. The latter because it is not necessary to know all Aymara words to teach our sacred mysteries.)

Gonçález Holguín told his superiors that he emphasized words that had to do with God, the virtuous soul, Mass, the church, and so on. He further acknowledged that he was forced to manufacture equivalent words for “sin,” “miracle,” “sermon,” and so on, in “qquichua.” This method of selection implies a hidden asymmetry: the dictionaries match words and phrases in a one-­to-­one equivalence even as the worldviews, and the languages, of Indigenous people are painted in terms of lack, discrepancy, and ignorance. Measuring the languages against each other in the form of a bilingual dictionary, as democratic as it seems, would thus have served to show the Indigenous tongue to be wanting, given the terms in which the Spaniards developed the framework for comparison. The implicit hierarchy among languages encoded in the bilingual dictionaries was sequitur to the epistemic field from which they emerged. The Spaniards were primarily equipped to view the cosmology of Native peoples through their own monolithic logic of the world. Sabine MacCormack comments, “Because demons acted in the same human and natural universe as God, it followed that they obeyed the same psychological and physical laws. There was thus no need to devise a distinct vocabulary of otherness or difference with which to describe religious phenomena and experiences beyond or to one side of the Catholic Church in Spain”

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(1993, 107). Non-­Christian practices could only be seen in terms set forth by the church. Those words, practices, and beliefs that corresponded to forms of thinking and acting beyond the pale of Catholicism could only be read as deviant.9 Though difference does not necessarily imply hierarchy, Bertonio, Gonçález Holguín, and Lagunas hint at condescension in their description of Indigenous languages. Sahagún, Olmos, and Molina seemed to view Nahuatl as brilliant, even as they also saw the language as encoding spiritual errancy. Probing the depths of the language and developing a feel for the nuances, they argued, was necessary in order to root out the errancy. Occasionally, these early lexicographers made visible the ways in which incommensurable differences in worldviews were rendered into Christian terms. In one entry, Gonçález Holguín defined Viracocha self-­ servingly as the “Dios que adoravan los Indios” (God that the Indians worshipped), and reported that “de ya por cosa divina llamavan a los Españoles viracocha, como hijos de aquel Dios” (now, due to divine intervention, they called the Spaniards Viracocha, as if they were the children of that God) (Gonçález Holguín 1586, 172).10 Gonçález Holguín glossed “Pacha cuti pacha ticra” as “El fin del mundo, o grande destruicion pestilencia, ruyna, o perdida, o daño comun” (The end of the world, or grand pestilence, ruin, or loss, or widespread shared damage) ([1608] 2007, 184). Ludovico Bertonio, for his part, took “Pachakuti” as “time of war,” but he appropriated this concept and placed it within a resolutely Christian eschatology: “Pachacuti: Tiempo de guerra. + Y también agora 9. On occasion, a chronicler might note what he thought could be evidence of a rudimentary or proto-­Christian belief or practice. See note 10. 10. Salles-­Reese (2010) points out that the cronistas Betanzos, Cieza de León, Sarmiento de Gamboa, and Molina, in their respective chronicles, each betray a troubled, ambivalent relationship to Viracocha. They had difficulty perceiving Viracocha completely absent any trace of Catholic beliefs, nor could they see Viracocha as a strictly pagan god. One finds the same tension in Santa Cruz Pachacuti (1993, 79–­87). Regina Harrison (1989, 93–­94) acknowledges the difficulty in translating Viracocha but takes Gonçález Holguín at his word when he writes in his Vocabulario in 1608 that Viracocha already referred to the Spaniards and was otherwise a dead metaphor. Additional note on Gonçález Holguín’s body of work: A 1586 edition of the Vocabulario is often attributed to Gonçález Holguín, although some scholars dispute this attribution. For the purposes of this discussion, I attribute both the 1586 edition and a 1608 version to Gonçález Holguín.

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lo toman para significar el juyzio final" (And now they take it to signify the final judgment) (Bertonio 1612, 242).11 The friars also took words or concepts out of Indigenous languages to fashion neologisms to serve as religious concepts that would have been foreign to the Americas. So, for example, Bertonio’s Vocabulario offers “Resurreccionatpacha,” conjoining the Catholic concept of resurrection with the complex Indigenous concept of pacha. Bertonio glossed this as “Desde pascua de resurrección” (starting on Easter Sunday) (Bertonio [1612] 2011). Unsurprisingly, God is overlexicalized in many of these books (or at least amply lexicalized). Some dictionaries provide almost a dozen terms for “dios,” as well as telling phrases such as (my renderings in English) “There is always room at Mass,” “You haven’t been to church if you haven’t been to Mass,” and “Every time I think of God, I want to cry.” By fashioning neologisms and supplying new meanings for preexisting Indigenous words, the missionaries were tacitly marking the conceptual impoverishment of the languages of the conquered in the areas that mattered most to them. In sum, in the dictionaries one finds a strict dichotomization alternating with an attempt to meld the two languages and worldviews, where remnants of Indigenous cosmologies are recuperated in the service of a Christian worldview. The dichotomy sometimes takes the form of framing Indigenous lies versus “our” secret mysteries, or paganism versus Christianity. And sometimes this dichotomy is portrayed as a sequence, a before and after the initiation of Spanish evangelization—­really, the Conquest—­as illustrated in the examples of Viracocha or Pachakuti above. Sahagún and others regularly placed the belief systems of the Nahua in the past tense, as if wishing these beliefs into the past, a rhetorical move that Johannes Fabian (1983) would call the denial of coevalness. Here the Spaniards inscribed an account of cultural and linguistic change, filtered through their Christian worldview, transforming or transculturating all the actors. We have, then, in the bilingual dictionary a complicated cultural representation of an equality among languages that is simultaneously a 11. For Guamán Poma de Ayala, Pachacuti also seems to have implied cataclysm, which for him may have included the Christian God’s wrath (see Guamán Poma de Ayala [1615] 2006, 94 in original manuscript). Yet, unlike most of the Christian priests, Guamán Poma saw the world or universe reborn after a series of Pachacutis, making for various sequential ages or iterations.

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relation of inequality, since one language is claimed as superior. The bilingual dictionary is a peculiar kind of artifact that reflects the contradictory imagination of the Spaniards. But it is not just an artifact: it was also a means, and has remained so. This is why interrogating these dictionaries and their compilers can tell us something important about colonization through language. The logic of word-­for-­word equivalence was key.

CONSTITUTIVE INCOMMENSURABILITY The bilingual dictionary seems to have been predicated on the belief that one could break down the complexity of the cosmos, both its visible and invisible parts, into individual word-­sized claims about the outside world and then find, invent, or sculpt the equivalent in another language. A word was seized on for its referential value in relation to a world that was understood as composed of objects that had their own existence apart from language. The presupposition may have been that, at root, words refer to objects in the external world, and in that sense are equivalent; some languages might deify the infernal, or otherwise go off the rails, but in those cases the language could be nudged into the proper order. The Conquest was a colossal social change in all spheres of life. The bilingual dictionary enacted a displacement in language (Spivak 1988, 3–­4) by making the languages comparable. Making them comparable or commensurate changed both sides of the equation by bringing them into intimate relation. Commensuration, argue Espeland and Stevens, is an operation that is radically inclusive; commensuration offers “an abstract form of unity that can potentially encompass any valued thing” (1998, 324). They continue: The capacity to create relationships between virtually anything is extraordinary in that it simultaneously overcomes distance (by creative ties between things where none before had existed) and imposes distance (by expressing value in such abstract, remote ways). In so doing, commensuration creates new things, new relations among disparate and remote things, and changes the meanings of old things. (324)

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The dictionaries were technologies of commensuration (Hanks 2010). By coining new terms and by placing older Indigenous concepts in a Christian cosmology, the priests pressed for the transformation of the languages of the conquered. In some cases, by framing two words as equivalent, the dictionaries implicitly engaged in a kind of deicide. Gonçález Holguín glossed “inti” narrowly as “sun” (sol), ignoring the godlike qualities the concept Inti connoted: he simply eliminated the pagan god as referent. Similarly, Santo Tomás rendered “Yndi” as “sol, planeta” (1560, 142). Comparing the sacred entity known as Inti to the fiery astronomic sphere we know as “sun” in English and “sol” in Spanish may be to abandon the concept of Inti/Yndi in all of its deific splendor. The religious lexicographers left out other related concepts that did not conform to their Christian worldview. Julio Calvo Pérez (1997, 261) points out that Gonçález Holguín omitted words that speak of cosmographies foreign or dangerous to the Castilian imagination; Gonçález Holguín did not include inti raymi, the sun festival. Other concepts were denigrated in the way they were glossed in Spanish, associated with idolatry and drunkenness. The bilingual dictionaries thus implicitly marginalized Indigenous ways of interpreting the world, what Miranda Fricker might term hermeneutic marginalization (Fricker 2007; I return to this theme in greater detail in the next chapter). If translating involved an act of measuring one worldview against another, then, when the translator already held that the Indigenous worldview was inferior, “translating” was based on abandoning a full appreciation of the Indigenous theology. The missionaries’ intentions vitiated the project from the beginning. If one participates in linguistic extirpation, if one likens bringing the word of God to the Quechua people to bringing bread to a starving man, if one conceives of Peruvians as bereft of the possibility of heaven when they deny or are merely unaware of (the Christian) God’s solace, if one devalues the Indigenous systems of belief, or thinks them wayward or wicked, or takes them as symptoms or symbols of ignorance, then one cannot gain a genuine understanding of the people and their worldview(s). Indigenous languages were thus not just incommensurate with Castilian, they were constitutively incommensurate given the missionaries’ underlying project of conversion. Philosopher Joseph Raz has argued that for activities that are constitutively incommensurate, making them

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commensurate would mean failing to pursue them well (1986, 353). Putting a price on one’s child means that one does not fully understand or appreciate the experience of parenting. Constitutive incommensurability posed a particular problem for the priests since they based their comparison on a premise of epistemic and spiritual asymmetry where the Indigenous interpretation of the world was marginalized and where the ultimate goal was subjection and spiritual conversion. In his incisive Radiograf ía de la pampa ([1933] 1985), Ezequiel Martínez Estrada comments that the Spanish conquistadores “lied without intending to” (mentían sin quererlo). They were hampered by a poor vocabulary and clumsy intelligence. . . . It is very difficult to reproduce today that world in the small minds of those brutal men who at the same time were ridding themselves of the Arabs and everything Arab. (Martínez Estrada [1933] 1985, 5; my translation)

Martínez Estrada cautions us not to mistake the vision narrated by the conquering Iberians for the reality of the New World. What they described as the New World was “not located on any place on the planet, nor did it have form. It was a capricious stretch of land populated with images” (6). The bilingual dictionaries they produced register the unequal battle the Spaniards waged between their limited imagination and the dazzling world they encountered, between their impoverished vocabulary and the rich cosmology of the Indigenous people. One sees this in Gonçález Holguín, who struggles to communicate a different set of time-­space coordinates from his own when he translates pacha as “Tiempo suelo lugar” (Time ground place), without commas or punctuation, as if he were suggesting a conjunction or perhaps leaving ambiguous the conceptual relation between these terms. Literary critic Antonio Cornejo Polar noticed how the cronista Cieza de León tried to describe guanacos as “like donkeys, some bigger than others, with long necks, like camels.” Cornejo Polar attributed this odd comparison to the communicative dilemma of Spaniards trying to squeeze a meaningful interpretation from a reality they found deeply baffling (1989, 19).12 Glancing at the numerous canards, 12. I thank Jorge Coronado (oral communication) for this reference.

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misrepresentations, and exaggerations by the chroniclers or the many turgid letters the conquistadores wrote home, it is hard to disagree with Martínez Estrada’s and Cornejo Polar’s assessments. Bilingual dictionaries are not impossible. Obviously they are possible: people have produced them for hundreds of years. However, the terms of their emergence reveal how they have been used to flatten languages, as they tend to presuppose a monolithic view of language. The origins of bilingual dictionaries have also proven to be consequential in the formation of racial hierarchy and the distortion of Indigenous worldviews.

BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES AND REGIMES OF READING AND WRITING Part of the constitutive incommensurability between languages was the different semiotic systems that characterized Western and non-­Western languages. The Iberians brought their logocentrism with them when they imposed a culture of the book and written systems of grammar (Boone and Mignolo 2004). The bilingual dictionaries, in presupposing Western systems of signs and symbols, contributed to sealing or fixing Western hegemony. Various Indigenous nations had their own semiologies, from the Nahua pictograms to the Quechua quipu. Thenceforth, these pre-­ Columbian semiotic systems interacted with the materiality and ideology of Western reading and writing cultures, as Walter Mignolo puts it (1995, 76). These interactions (and the hybrid creativity they spawned) can be seen in the work of Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, and the authors of the Chilam Balam. The Spaniards, for their part, generally made the assumption that “language” for both parties marked the same domain. In other words, they assumed that language itself meant the same thing to the many Indigenous peoples as it did to them. The vocabulario was predicated on that logic. Linguist Alonso de Molina suggested as much, putting languages on the same plane—­relativizing them, so to speak—­when he wrote that there were some concepts lacking in Nahuatl (“Mexicana”) while noting, “on the other hand, the things which they had which we lacked in our language” (cited in Clayton and Campbell 2002, 352). The idea that language (or lengua) meant the same thing to all involved or had the same properties across the different worldviews was an unjustified

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assumption. “Language” as a concept is a pseudo-­universal in this sense (Eoyang 1993, 238). What some Indigenous peoples called—­and call—­ language had—­has—­a different, even incommensurate, epistemological and ontological status for its speakers from the status language had for the Spaniards. Different languages do different things for and to their speakers. Different languages relate the speaker to their body and to the surroundings in a different way. Who or what counts as a speaker is different (see also Kohn 2013). The Spaniards assumed that “language” for both parties was the domain solely of the human, where the human/nonhuman distinction was fundamental (even if Indigenous people were ambiguously human for the European). This was the Castilian concept of language itself. But not all Indigenous people saw language this way. And this was not only true in the colonial era. For the Quechua and some other Indigenous peoples, nonhuman actors could, and can, speak. As we shall see, these different understandings of language and of who can speak are still true. It is not only the case that individual words fail to match up clearly and cleanly (how do you render pachamama in English?). Entire languages do not match up either. It is not clear that the missionaries had a deep sense of the way Native peoples saw their respective languages in relation to the world.

STONES THAT SPEAK: LANGUAGE ONTOLOGIES Over the centuries, many Indigenous and mestizx thinkers have made this point about incommensurate conceptualizations of language itself. José María Arguedas (to whom I return in the next chapter) sees Quechua as incommensurate with Spanish in its way of positioning a speaker with respect to the natural world without presupposing the nature/ culture divide (1939; see also chapter 2). Arturo Escobar writes of the increasingly well-­known concept of sentipensar (feeling/thinking) in a way that consciously violates the reason/emotion split (2020, 2, 69). Contemporary writer and essayist Lee Maracle of the Stó:lō Nation argues that some entities rendered as inanimate objects in Occidental thinking are for her and her people capable of language and speech (2015, 3–­4).

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Contemporary philosopher Mario Vilca, from the Puna of Jujuy in Argentina, amplifies Maracle’s point about her language in an extraordinary essay on Andean languages, “Piedras que hablan, gente que escucha: La experiencia del espacio andino como un ‘otro’ que interpela” (2010; Stones that Speak, People Who Listen: The Experience of Andean Space as an “Other” Who Names) (see also Kusch 2010). According to Vilca, in the Andean world human subjects are interpellated by the Pachamama, who not only holds power over life and death but determines the relative stability or instability of the universe. Human beings must make offerings to the Pachamama to keep a balance in the world. The relation is agonistic and interactive, one in which nature is a subject that lives, speaks, and threatens to swallow human beings. El hombre andino no vive en un universo objetivo y neutro, en donde plácidamente puede desarrollar su existencia, tampoco establece una relación armónica con el mundo natural en el que vive de modo paradisíaco, el modelo del “buen salvaje” rousseauiano. Por el contrario, su existencia está rodeada de claroscuros, de opacidades, en donde debe guiarse por los senderos establecidos por la costumbre, por los meandros de los rituales, por las obligadas reciprocidades con que busca asegurar un orden que conjure la arbitrariedad de los seres con los que convive. (Vilca 2010, 68) (The Andean people do not live in an objective and neutral universe, in which existence unfolds placidly. Nor do they live in harmony with the natural world as if it were paradise, on the model of Rousseau’s “good savage.” On the contrary, their lives are surrounded by chiaroscuros, opacities, in which they must follow the paths established by custom, the complex rituals, and the terms of reciprocity needed to ensure an order capable of placating the arbitrariness of the beings with which they live.)

Vilca contrasts this with the Occidental view of nature as a passive, empirical reality that can be described through language. La noción de “paisaje”, desde el Renacimiento al romanticismo tenía la connotación de la distancia de la contemplación. Es decir un subjectum (el sujeto) enfrentado a un objectum (la naturaleza). Con un proyecto

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de instrumentalidad y ordenamiento de la naturaleza en función de las necesidades del hombre. (67n2) (The notion of the “landscape” from the Renaissance to Romanticism has connoted contemplative distance. That is to say, the subjectum [subject] confronts an objectum [nature] instrumentally, seeking to order nature to meet the human subject’s needs.)

Vilca sees the world of sickness and health, of balance and revolution, as tied to a language that emanates from outside of the human. Así el susto (la pérdida del alma), la maradura, la sopladura, la loquera, la aikadura, el mal de ojo, entre algunas de las enfermedades andinas, son los modos de interpelación del mundo, de la geograf ía viviente. . . . Los vientos helados y el frío lacerante constriñen el espíritu de tal modo que los relatos de aparecidos, de duendes, de tíos, de coquenas, de rayos que “tiran” animales y humanos determinan que la cotidianidad del habitante andino esté despojada de connotaciones estéticas. Presionan a tener cuidado y respeto. Se vive y se muere impregnados de lo numinoso, donde las fuerzas del entorno se vivencian como infinitamente superiores. . . . . . . Lo que interpela no es una alteridad idílica que el hombre deba pastorear y cuidar sino una alteridad espantosa que amenaza la existencia a cada paso que da, en cada movimiento que emprende. Es la presencia de lo arbitrario, que puede devenir fasto o nefasto. Los modos de esa presencia han configurado modos de re-­presentarlo, de nombrarlo, seducirlo, socializarlo, respetarlo como un irreducible “otro” al que se trata con las reglas de cortesía de la tradición. Se lo invita a comer, a beber, a fumar, y coquear; se le pide permiso en todo emprendimiento. (68–­70) In this way, susto [the loss of one’s soul], maradura, sopladura, loquera, aikadura, and the evil eye, among other Andean sicknesses, are ways the world, a living geography, interpellates. . . . The freezing winds and the lacerating cold constrict the spirit to such an extent that the stories of apparitions, spirits, tíos, coquenas, and lightning rays that pierce humans and animals alike determine that the everyday life of the Andean dweller

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is shorn of any aesthetic connotation. They compel Andean people to be careful and respectful; Andeans live and die impregnated by the noumenal. They experience the surrounding forces as infinitely superior. . . . . . . That entity which interpellates is not an idyllic other that people must shepherd and care for. Rather, it is a frightful other that threatens existence at every step, in every movement. It is the presence of the arbitrary that could become auspicious or inauspicious. The modalities of that presence have configured modalities to re-­present it, to name it, seduce it, socialize it, respect it as an irreducible “other” which must be regarded according to the terms of courtesy and tradition. It must be invited to eat, to drink, to smoke, or to chew coca; one asks its permission before any undertaking.

The Spanish chroniclers believed that the rituals and ritual objects used to supplicate the Pachamama were tricks, fraudulent, indecent, and sinful. En las primeras crónicas sobre el mundo andino los cronistas, visitadores o inquisidores, ven simples piedras o cerros en los dioses andinos. Los visitantes los asimilan a objetos ligados a creencias animistas, idolátricas, en suma erróneas e ignorantes. Solo se ven objetos naturales. (72) (In the early written accounts of the Andean world, the chroniclers, visitors, or inquisitors saw the Andean gods as simply rocks or mountain cliffs. The visitors viewed those objects connected to animism as idolatry, as ignorance or as error. These visitors saw only natural objects.)

Vilca reveals language to have a different function, purpose, and relation to the natural world and the world of human beings than it does for Europeans. The world interpellates human beings, perhaps even more than human beings name the world. For the Europeans, language is properly human. Human language describes the state of affairs in the outside world. The world is composed of natural objects. For the Andean people, language is understood to be also within the purview of, or a property of, the Pachamama, which can use language to engulf the human. Other Indigenous peoples also see a world of beings in what for most Westerners or Euro-­Americans is the object world. Here is Lee Maracle: “Stone is our oldest grandfather. We refer to the stones that keep our

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songs and stories as grandfathers” (2015, 3–­4). This is not necessarily to be understood metaphorically. Bilingual dictionaries do not countenance these quite opposed understandings of language, its substance, and which entities are endowed with language. Instead, they grind them into commensuration; that is the structure and function of the vocabularios. In the hands of Indigenous and mestizx people, languages are hitched together in another way, or in various other ways, as we shall see in the next chapter. This opposition between Indigenous and Western is not absolute or constant, nor has it been. New directions in theories of language and representation, such as Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) understanding of semiosis beyond the human, to take just one example, move beyond the binary.

CONCLUSION The missionaries’ theological framework was linked to their understanding of the universe and of the nature of time, matter, the constellations, the spirit world, and language itself. For them, this was the only correct vision. It was connected to Castilian (Spanish) and their own identity. Their religion tied together metaphysics, ontology, language, and the inherent rightness of their position and their role in expounding that position and persuading or forcing others to acknowledge their truth. This led them to impose implicit hierarchies of language speakers and of languages themselves. These hierarchies were racialized. Although the vocabularios appear to place all languages on the same level, most of the Iberian invaders did not really conceive of all languages in the same way or see them as equal. Neither did the Indigenous people. From Vilca, we see that languages each have their own ontology. Bilingual dictionaries presuppose commonality when no such commonality might obtain. The bilingual dictionary makes languages as such equivalent. As a technology of epistemicide, the bilingual dictionary failed to recognize Indigenous concepts of language. It instituted a binary even as it brought two “languages” in relation to each other. It performed a contradictory operation, in a sense: the incommensurable, the nonequivalent, was made commensurate and

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equivalent through translation. The differential functions each language serves for the speaker, the way each language stands in relation to the land, to the firmament, to the role and understanding of history, memory, group identity, and so on, were suppressed as part of the condition for the possibility of a bilingual dictionary predicated on seeing languages as equal. The missionaries developed bilingual dictionaries under the limitations of a distended and badly stretched imagination, to paraphrase Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, confined to a narrow epistemic frame ill-­ equipped to assimilate foreign ideas or to take up other ways of being on their own terms (Martínez Estrada [1933] 1985, 5). This conceptual limitation in conceiving of other cultures and ontologies as other cultures and ontologies was buttressed because the missionaries’ ulterior motive was normative, including their intent to standardize the Indigenous languages and transmit a certain idea of the human soul, of transubstantiation, of the Holy Trinity, of confession, and so on. It is not that the missionaries simply got it wrong in the sense of attributing the wrong meanings to words. The dictionary reflects a structure of thinking. The structure of the vocabulario was not only linguistic, it was metalinguistic: it was a technology that commented on the relation between languages. The Spanish (or Castilian) invasion of the Americas, and the values implicit in that invasion, are manifest in this structure of the bilingual vocabulario. Conversely, these early bilingual dictionaries were part of the structure of settler colonialism (see Wolfe 2006). The bilingual dictionary and its structure have been, finally, full of moral, epistemic, and perceptual consequences. The Aymara intellectual Félix Layme (1984, 59ff.) points out that contemporary Aymara people and their allies confront an ironic legacy in the bilingual dictionary of Fray Bertonio, a resource still consulted today. Though Bertonio was dedicated to the extirpation of Indigenous idols and to converting the people, his lexicographical work is a crucial one for those who are trying to recuperate Aymara identity and history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The recuperation of the Aymara past is rooted in the Aymara resurgence today, and survival today is rooted in part in the recuperation of the Aymara past. The irony is similar to that which subaltern people have confronted the world over: written history has been supplied in

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significant part by people dedicated to their elimination. In “Entre el kechwa y el castellano, la angustia del mestizo” (1939; The Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish), José María Arguedas describes the anguish he perceives echoing across five centuries of colonial presence, as people like him try to reconcile or even to pass back and forth fluidly between these worlds that he, too, saw as incommensurate.

CHAPTER 2 THE ANGUISH OF DECOLONIAL TRANSLATION José María Arguedas and Walter Benjamin

EPISTEMICIDE INVOLVES DENIGRATING, DISAPPEARING, IGNORING, or discrediting knowledge produced by subaltern intelligentsia. Eurocentric scholarship, the Global North, and the West tend to sideline or disregard intellectuals from the Global South and undervalue their contributions. This amounts to epistemic marginalization. Bodies of knowledge and whole traditions of thought produced by subalternized people are more often absent or consigned to anthropological study than taken up in departments of philosophy in the North and the South. While historical structures such as racism, sexism, and unequal access to education engender and reinforce epistemic marginalization, two theoretical tendencies common in Western paradigms are obstacles to taking full stock of non-­Western knowledge production on its own terms. In a disembodied epistemology, one writes as if from nowhere, negating the lived experience of the body (see Halewood 1995, 3; Nagel 1986; Smith 1987). Theory that takes up embodied experience is often treated with distrust. The second tendency is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has termed “metonymic reason,” the tendency to see Western theory as the only theory, and thus the accompanying tendency to overlook the richness in the non-­West (Santos 2004, 2014). Metonymic reason takes the

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part for the whole. Metonymic reason and disembodied epistemologies tend to erase the non-­West. This erasure is not always conscious: a minimizing of the contributions of people of color and people from colonized traditions can be built into the very structures of departments of philosophy or social science, their canons and curricula, accepted methodologies, or indeed the structure of entire disciplines or universities. But ignoring people outside of Euro-­American centers results in an incalculable loss of knowledge; “missed opportunity” does not capture the magnitude of the cost. There are significant social costs as well, some monumental.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN? Mitigating the damage involves recuperating these contributions or otherwise fighting against their marginalization. Carole Boyce Davies reclaimed Claudia Jones, the “disappeared” radical Black woman who is the subject of Boyce Davies’s Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2007). In The Scholar Denied, Aldon Morris describes how sociologists have largely downplayed or directly erased the methodological and theoretical contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois (Morris 2015; also see Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). Gary Wilder has theorized the utopian futures constructed by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization and the Future of the World (2015). Robin Kelley (2000) has documented how Cedric Robinson’s monumental Black Marxism: The Making of a Radical Tradition has too often been ignored. Through their scholarship, Boyce Davies, Kelley, Wilder, and Morris show us paths that social theory might have taken had it followed these earlier thinkers in their antiracist and anticolonial writings and projects.1 They point to alternative directions for thinking that have heretofore been unattained or unpursued. Novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–­69) was another thinker whose contribution has been minimized or ignored, especially outside Peru. Arguedas’s translation theories might have 1. Some scholarly associations, such as the Caribbean Philosophical Society, make the recuperation of thinkers who have been marginalized an explicit part of their mission.

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brought the nascent discipline of translation studies and comparative literature to a different place had his work been accorded anywhere near the scholarly attention received by his contemporary Walter Benjamin. Arguedas was a Peruvian writer, often considered one of Latin America’s most important and original twentieth-­century authors. He wrote his novels and poetry in Spanish, the Indigenous Quechua, and what he once termed a mistura, a mixture. As Arguedas himself points out, he is heir to a tradition of attempting to reconcile what José Carlos Mariátegui once termed “the still unresolved dualism of Quechua-­Spanish” (quoted in Cornejo Polar 1989). Less well known than Arguedas’s novels and poetry is Arguedas’s research on translation, language, and identity. Trained as a linguist and anthropologist, Arguedas collected and wrote on Quechua hymns, linguistics, and folklore. He also wrote on national identity (see Arguedas 1992; Rama 1975; de la Cadena 2000). Countless critics have discussed his literary output; numerous academic conferences, colloquia, and congresses have been dedicated to parsing Arguedas’s legacy (e.g., Feldman 2014; Esparza et al. 2013; Lambright 2007; Nauss Millay 2005). Though his major novels have been translated into English and other languages, as of this date, only one collection of his scholarship on Quechua folklore has been published in English (Arguedas 1957). It is not too late. José María Arguedas’s 1939 essay “The Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish” (“Entre el kechwa y el castellano, la angustia del mestizo”) is an alternative to the kind of Eurocentric theorizing that lends itself to epistemicide. Building on the previous chapter, this chapter contrasts Arguedas’s “Anguish of the Mestizo” with Walter Benjamin’s canonical “The Task of the Translator” ([1923] 1969). Reading Arguedas contrapuntally to Walter Benjamin throws into relief what could be termed Arguedas’s decolonial approach to translation (see E. Said 1994, 66–­67). The theme of Benjamin’s essay appears at first to be roughly parallel to that of Arguedas’s insofar as both essays take up how entire languages are transformed through translation. They both address how translation engenders interdependence among languages. Languages are invigorated and transformed, and new horizons for each language open up through translation.

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The contrast between them indicates the critical difference in Arguedas’s decolonial methodology. In Arguedas, difference comes alive. In theories that intellectually support epistemicide, difference is muted. Arguedas’s work offers an alternative and counterpoint to Eurocentric theory. Arguedas’s essay is not very well known, whereas Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary and justifiably famous essay on translation is a common reference point in translation studies and has achieved canonical status in comparative literature. This is not a coincidence.

TRANS-­M ODERN REPLIES AND DECOLONIAL METHODOLOGY Modernity is a global phenomenon. But various histories of colonization (French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, U.S., and so on) in diverse parts of the globe have significantly conditioned the experiences of and meanings associated with modernity. For Arguedas, the power of colonization to transform subject populations is evident in its disruption of the languages of Indigenous people. As people translated back and forth across colonial divides, they were caught betwixt and between, with resounding consequences for their identities. In the crucible of colonization, moreover, these translators changed the shape of the languages of both the colonizers and the colonized (Rafael 1996; Liu 1995). Writing about the modernity/coloniality group, a movement of contemporary Latin American theorists, Arturo Escobar poses a series of questions that set the stage for how to think of Arguedas as engaged in decolonial research (although Escobar is not writing about Arguedas). European theory has traditionally arrogated the mantle of “universal theory” to itself, argues the modernity/coloniality group. Could it be, however, that the power of Eurocentered modernity—­as a particular local history—­lies in the fact that it has produced particular global designs in such a way that it has “subalternized” other local histories and their corresponding designs? If this is the case, could one posit the hypothesis that radical alternatives to modernity are not a historically foreclosed possibility? If so, how can we articulate a project around this possibility? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an “exteriority” to the modern world system?

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That one may envision alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity, and adumbrate not a different totality leading to different global designs, but a network of local/global histories constructed from the perspective of a politically enriched alterity? (Escobar 2013, 36–37; emphasis in the original)

Enrique Dussel helps fill in how different futures can be imagined beyond the limits of European theory. Modernity’s technical and economic globality is far from being a cultural globalization of everyday life that valorizes the majority of humanity. From this omitted potentiality and altering “exteriority” emerges a project of “trans”-­modernity, a “beyond” that transcends Western modernity (since the West has never adopted it but, rather, has scorned it and valued it as “nothing”) and that will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-­first century. . . . Modernity’s recent impact on the planet’s multiple cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindu, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American) produced a varied “reply” by all of them to the modern “challenge.” Renewed, they are now erupting on a cultural horizon “beyond” modernity. I call the reality of that fertile multicultural moment “trans”-­modernity. (2002, 221)

Dussel sees a variety of responses to European modernity emerge from outside of Europe. The West tends to devalue these replies.

“ANGUISH OF THE MESTIZO” Arguedas’s essay “La angustia del mestizo” is a “trans-­modern reply” in Dussel’s sense. It is a response by a thinker from a culture that was deeply influenced as well as utterly disrupted by Europe’s modernizing project. The resulting mestizx culture was largely ignored except as an exotic token of the past. Arguedas’s work erupts on a cultural horizon beyond “Eurocentered” modernity, as Escobar puts it, but is deeply engaged with Eurocentric modernity. Arguedas, who committed suicide in 1969, was a native Quechua speaker; while he did not identify as “ethnically” Quechua, by his own

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account he grew up with a thoroughly Quechua worldview (Arguedas 1992; Cornejo Polar 2013). Although he situated his own literary contribution in a long history of Peruvian writers who had absorbed both the colonizing Spanish and the native Quechua thinking, Arguedas was revolutionary—­and controversial—­for how he incorporated the Indigenous Quechua language, sensibility, and worldview. He translated himself into Spanish, as he once put it. In doing so, he was able to change the expressive possibilities of Spanish. Aníbal Quijano wrote that Arguedas was forced to choose. He had to choose between Spanish, the dominant language, and Quechua, the dominated language, to express the needs of the dominated population to communicate. He chose to write in the dominant language, contriving in the process, however, to achieve the transmission of some of the expressive possibilities of the dominated language. His was a program of linguistic subversion, really something like the creation of a new literary language. (Quijano 1995, 213)

Antonio Cornejo Polar called Arguedas’s work “heterogeneous” insofar as it aimed for such a reconciliation or fusion between the colonizer’s language and the rich social realities of the Americas (Cornejo Polar 2013, 1989). Ángel Rama saw Arguedas as a prime example of literary transculturation (Rama [1982] 2012). In “The Anguish of the Mestizo Between Spanish and Quechua,” Arguedas discusses the consequences of Spanish colonization for Andean languages, Andean literature, and the Andean people. Arguedas situates a history of conflict, initiated by colonialism, between the interior world of the mestizo and the requirement, the need, the obligation, the desire to use Spanish.2 The clash of language engendered an existential predicament for the Andean mestizo. Quechua orients the mestizo in the world, writes Arguedas. It is the language that can capture the otherwise inexpressible desires of the soul,

2. I have opted to follow Arguedas’s usage of the masculine form mestizo when referring to his work, whereas I use the gender-­neutral mestizx whenever I use the term more generally or generically.

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the quality of light, the smells and textures of the Andes: people’s inhabitation, in short, of the Andean world. El kechwa es la expresión legítima del hombre de esta tierra, del hombre como criatura de este paisaje y de esta luz. Con el kechwa se habla en forma profunda, se describe y se dice el alma de esta luz y de este campo, como belleza y como residencia. (Arguedas 1939) (Quechua is the legitimate expression of the people of this land, of people as the offspring nurtured by this countryside and this light. With Quechua one speaks in a profound way, one describes and one speaks the soul of this light and this land, and one speaks of it as beauty and as one’s home.)3

“But other people came,” continues Arguedas, “with another language, the expression of another race and of another landscape” (Pero vino otra gente con otro idioma, otro idioma expresión de otra raza y de otro paisaje). Arguedas locates the initial expression of this conflict between Spanish and Quechua in the monumental figure of Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, the sixteenth-­century itinerant Indigenous author who chronicled the colonizers’ abuses of the Native people, writing in a mixture of Quechua and Spanish. Arguedas sees the conflict in the mestizo reverberate down through the centuries to the work of the great twentieth-­ century poet César Vallejo. But the question of linguistic hybridity is not limited to the rarefied realm of high literature. Arguedas sees it as a general social condition throughout the Andes. He refers to an “uneasy desire for a legitimate mode of expression” (su ansia por un medio legítimo de expresión), born at the nexus of a linguistic contradiction. This condition results in what we might call a forced poetics, to borrow Édouard Glissant’s term (1989, 120–­21), where one forces one’s expression through the imposed colonial language. For Arguedas, the conflict has no resolution. That unsettled, unanswerable dilemma marks the mestizo as mestizo. The resulting mestizo literature is also marked by its striving to find some form of expression. 3. The translations of Arguedas are my own in collaboration with Gabriela Veronelli and María Constanza Guzmán.

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Esa mistura tiene un signo: El hombre del Ande no ha logrado el equilibrio entre su necesidad de expresión integral y el castellano como su idioma obligado. Y hay, ahora, una ansia, una especie de desesperación en el mestizo por dominar este idioma. (Arguedas 1939) (That mixture has a sign: the people of the Andes have not achieved equilibrium between their necessity for integrated expression and Spanish as an obligatory language. And there is now an anxiety, a kind of desperation in the mestizo to dominate the language.)

Arguedas then takes a step unusual for a translator or anthropologist, though not for an essayist: he takes himself as an example. Y permítanme aquí que me refiera a mi propio problema que es, seguramente, un ejemplo tipo. Cuando empecé a escribir, relatando la vida de mi pueblo, sentí en forma angustiante que el castellano no me servía bien. No me servía bien ni para hablar del cielo y de la lluvia de mi tierra, ni mucho menos para hablar de la ternura que sentíamos por el agua de nuestras acequias, por los árboles de nuestras quebradas, ni menos aun para decir con toda la exigencia del alma nuestros odios y nuestros amores de hombre. Porque habiéndose producido en mi interior la victoria de lo indio, como raza y como paisaje, mi sed y mi dicha lo decía fuerte y hondo en kechwa. (Arguedas 1939) (Permit me here to refer to my own problem. It is certainly typical. When I began to write, to tell the story of the life of my pueblo [people], I felt a sort of anguish that Spanish did not serve me well. It didn’t serve me to speak of the sky or the rain of my land, much less to talk of the tenderness we feel for the water of our irrigation ditches, the trees of our gorges, and even less to speak our hatreds and our loves with all the urgency of the soul. This is because I spoke my thirst and my joys strongly and deeply in Quechua, since the victory of that which is Indian, as a race and as a landscape, had occurred inside me.)

The material of one’s expression is the ineffable spirit of a collectivity, a community, a group, a situation not merely his own. His “we” are the mestizxs, not of blood but of language, caught between Spanish and

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Quechua. While the subject/object duality is generally affirmed (and even policed) in Western social science, Arguedas does not separate the knowing subject and its object. His pronoun shifts serve as an index of the instability and anguish of his position. Elsewhere, his “we” clearly implies Western people in contrast to Quechua speakers and Indigenous people. For example, in a late interview, he describes how Quechua people conceive of the object-­realm. Ellos no conciben los bienes con criterio objetivo como el nuestro, sino aquello que a él le produce un bien, ya sea un animal o un sujeto inerte, causa en el sujeto un sentimiento de gratitud. Nosotros vemos una olla, un plato, un hacha como un instrumento. Ellos no lo ven así. Él levanta su hacha y la acaricia y le tiene amor porque ese instrumento le da a él el bienestar, le sirve para cambiar leña con otras cosas. En fin, es una fuente de bienestar y siendo así él le debe gratitud en una medida que nosotros no podemos sentir. (Arguedas 1975, emphasis added) (Indigenous people do not conceive of goods with an objective criterion like ours. Rather, that which produces a good, whether animal or inert, causes gratitude in the subject. We see a pot, a plate, an axe as an instrument. They don’t see it that way. The Indigenous people would raise the axe and caress it, and they feel love because that instrument contributes to their well-­being, serves them to transform firewood into other things. Ultimately, it’s a fountain of well-­being to which they owe gratitude in a measure we are not able to feel.)

Here he makes a divide between “‘nosotros” (we), who are Westerners, and “ellos” (they), who are Indigenous people. He includes himself and the putative reader on the side of the West. But in the texts cited earlier, he sees the “we” as the Quechua people, and he numbers himself among this Quechua “we.” In the latter case, he wants to communicate the referential and affective depth of Quechua even if he cannot fully translate that depth into the colonizer’s language. This suggests the need for an account of translation that can encompass deixis or shifters (linguistic figures that shift their reference depending on who uses them, such as I, you, here, now; see Jakobson [1956] 2010; Silverstein 1976). Arguedas

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shifts his place within a linguistic and racialized taxonomy so that he frames himself in different ways depending on the context. Sometimes he is a Quechua speaker, and sometimes he situates himself as a Westerner, speaking of Quechua speakers in the third person. He appropriates language to himself, at the conjunction of the two traditions.4 Hence his dilemma. In a context where Quechua speakers and their epistemologies are marginalized, Arguedas puts those frameworks at the center. This dilemma is not just linguistic and epistemic. It is methodological and becomes, ultimately, ontological. His analysis of language is anchored in his own orientation within and in relation to the object of study: the unstable, tormenting moment of living between Quechua and Spanish. Self-­expression for Arguedas, whether speaking or writing, requires self-­translation, which is at the same time self-­realization. Expression is a process of becoming. The question of self-­expression takes Arguedas into an unfinished ontological and epistemological state of ambivalence and ambiguity. Realizarse, traducirse, convertir en torrente diáfano y legítimo el idioma que parece ajeno; comunicar a la lengua casi extranjera la materia de nuestro espíritu. Esa es la dura, la dif ícil cuestión. (Arguedas [1950] 1980, 13) (To express oneself, to realize oneself, to translate oneself, to convert into a diaphanous and legitimate torrent the idiom that appears to be another’s; to communicate in the almost unfamiliar tongue the material of our spirit. That is the difficult, hard question.)

His aim is not to replace Western theory or epistemology. At this late date, that would be an impossible task (Kusch 2010; Escobar 2013). Marisol de la Cadena found that for Arguedas, “European thought is indispensable yet inadequate to explore questions of political modernity in the Third World” (2005, 20, citing Chakrabarty 2000, 16). Arguedas “explores the possibilities of renewing and transforming currently hegemonic forms of knowing from the margins of modernity” (de la Cadena 2005, 20). 4. I thank Constanza Guzmán for giving me this formulation.

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Arguedas acknowledges racial and linguistic hierarchies engendered by colonialism even as he wrestles with them (and he did not use these terms in this essay). He writes from within a cultural and geographic terrain in which colonizer and colonized lead an embattled coexistence (Mignolo 2000, 226–­27; Cornejo Polar 2013; Rama [1982] 2012, 1975; Feldman 2014; Archibald 2011; Vargas Llosa 2011; Moreiras 2001). In that crucible, he forges a language to describe the translation pressures that transformed both Spanish and Quechua. Although Arguedas loves Quechua and feels anchored within it, he sees Quechua as without universal possibilities and without a universal future. Since Arguedas aspires to universality, to universal expression, he is in a contradictory situation. The contradiction is dynamic. He and other mestizos not only learn, speak, and create in Spanish but also take possession of it (“dominar” is the verb in Spanish) and, in that way, adapt Spanish to their drive to self-­expression. Esta ansia de dominar el castellano llevará al mestizo hasta la posesión entera del idioma. Y su reacción sobre el castellano ha de ser porque nunca cesará de adaptar el castellano a su profunda necesidad de expresarse en forma absoluta, es decir, de traducir hasta la última exigencia de su alma, en la que lo indio es mando y raíz. (Arguedas 1939) (This anxiety to dominate Spanish will carry the mestizo to full possession of the language. And his reaction when confronted with Spanish will be because he will never cease to adapt Spanish to his profound necessity to express himself in clear and absolute form, that is, to translate all the way to the final demand made by his soul, that soul in which what is Indian is in control and is the root.)

This implies changes not just to the mestizo but also to Spanish. When the mestizo does succeed in conquering Spanish, Arguedas argues, Spanish will be transformed: Pero cuando lo haya logrado, cuando pueda hablar y hacer literatura en castellano con la absoluta propiedad con que ahora se expresa en kechwa, ese castellano ya no será el castellano de hoy, de una insignif-

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icante y apenas cuantitativa influencia kechwa, sino que habrá en él mucho del genio y quizá de la íntima sintaxis kechwa. (Arguedas 1939) (Once he achieves that, when he speaks and produces literature in Spanish with the absolute appropriateness with which he now expresses himself in Quechua, that Spanish will not be the Spanish of today, with an insignificant and hardly quantitative Quechua influence, but rather there will be much of the Quechua genius and maybe even the intimate syntax of Quechua in it.)

Arguedas sees this linguistic transformation not only as something occurring in himself but also as a social phenomenon that will alter the shape of the dominator’s language. In sum, Arguedas’s understanding of the imposition of Spanish on the Quechua people reflects the following claims:

A. The colonization of the Andes and Peru entailed linguistic violence, including the imposition of Spanish as both obligatory and desirable.



B. Translation occupies a central place in that colonial violence between cultures and traditions. Translation is a site of conflict, annihilation, survival, and mutation. As a site of conflict, translation transforms the dominant and vanquished languages, as well as the speakers of those languages.



C. As speaking subjects, mestizos, caught in between, typify this conflict. How they see and experience the worlds they inhabit and how they articulate their experiences are the focus of analysis.



D. Arguedas analyzes mestizos’ expressive acts as embodied, historically situated practices.



E. As a result of this troubled convergence, when Quechua speakers communicate in Spanish, they must force the complexity of their thinking through a language that is incapable of capturing the subtlety of Quechua. They create a forced poetics (Glissant 1997).



F. Writing and translating from that place of conflict locates the author vis-­à-­vis the object of study in a way in which the subject/object divide does not hold. In this case, since language is itself the object of study, Arguedas describes his own relationship to language. As a mestizo, he is at the point of overlap of at least two hermeneutical circles, Spanish and Quechua; these circles are asymmetric: Quechua is systemically and systematically marginalized.

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G. Due to the particular contingencies of colonization in the Andes and subsequent cultural and linguistic domination, Spanish and Quechua have developed interdependently ever since as people constantly shuttle back and forth, translating their subjectivity. Arguedas’s focus on subjective decisions made by historical actors, especially speech communities, but also poets and writers, implies a framework that upholds autonomy, including individual and collective agency.



H. These conditions of emergence engender an existential anguish. Arguedas analyzes and thoroughly incorporates affect as part of the process of translation, as part of the condition, as part of the motivation.



I. Since contingent human action is at the core of the clash, Arguedas provides the basis for an ethics of translation.



J. Despite the interdependency, languages are incommensurate with one another.

The final claim brings us back to the opening chapter on bilingual dictionaries. Even though Quechua and Spanish are both called “languages,” they have different ontological statuses for their speakers. Arguedas interweaves the history of colonization, the world of spirits, the natural world, philosophy, his lived body, subjectivity, and objectivity. Marisol de la Cadena has written: Arguedas’s public persona (as indicated by his work and testimonials of his life) proposed an alternative politics of knowledge, one that saw the necessity of western reason and its incapacity to translate, let alone capture or replace, Andean ways of being. (2005, 20)

Arguedas’s essay is anti-­theory—­theory that stands in tension with dominant theory and articulates an alternative reality.5 Yet calling it anti-­ theory may not give Arguedas’s work its due. His work is a contribution to a counterparadigm and a counterexample to paradigms that contribute to and uphold Western colonial ways of knowing as the only kind of knowledge. His writings on language and culture exceed the terms of European modernity, even as he engages with modernity. He is in dialogue with European modernity but not encompassed by it. In this sense 5. I derive the concept of anti-­theory from Halliday’s “anti-­language” (1978).

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his work is a trans-­modern “reply” (Dussel 2002). José María Arguedas provides an alternative to a Eurocentric set of assumptions about language and translation.

ARGUEDAS AS THE “PARTICULAR”: TWO COGNITIVE DEVICES THAT UPHOLD DOMINATION But what are these “Eurocentric” assumptions? Colonization has meant, among other things, not only imposing the dominator’s speech and inculcating the idea that the dominator’s language is of value for success and progress, but also, as a corollary, instilling the notion that the languages of the colonized are small, clumsy things, doomed to disappear, incapable of philosophy or science (Santos 2004; Cornejo Polar 2013). For European modernity, English, French, Spanish, and German are languages with a future. These languages are “vehicular,” as Édouard Glissant once put it, and are assumed to have universal value (Glissant 1997). At that point of the imposition of language and value, the politics of language becomes a question of cultural survival as minority languages are threatened. Translation theory inevitably becomes politically and ethically weighty. And, indeed, translation becomes not just an ethical matter but also affectively rich, marked by colonized people’s desires, grief, and hopes. Given the requirements of dominant European theory, and from that standpoint of European knowledge, Arguedas’s work is hopelessly local and “particular.” Some of the characteristics I list above, which make his work so valuable, original, and important, are ultimately what contributed to his eclipse by European theory. Two cognitive devices in Western theory are obstacles to countenancing other forms of knowledge on equal terms. In a disembodied epistemology, the first cognitive device, one writes as if it does not matter what kind of body one has or what one’s bodily experience of the world is. One negates the presence of the body in one’s writing and thinking. The result is a rhetoric in which the narrator is simultaneously nowhere (in no particular location) and everywhere (omniscient).6 6. On the voice from nowhere, see Susan Bordo (1993, 4, 39, 220–­29) and Nagel (1986). On the omniscient narrator, see Anderson (1991). Feminists from the United States, among

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“Metonymic reason,” the second obstacle, fits very well with disembodied epistemologies (Santos 2004). “Metonymy” refers to the rhetorical device of framing a part as the whole. Metonymic reason is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the West’s tendency to see itself as the totality of reason even though it is only a part (see Santos 2004, 2014). Western reason aspires to universality but also presupposes its own universality. Consequently, it imposes its own conceptual framework universally, even if it is merely a limited example—­local in its own way. Western reason, rationality, paradigms, and methods are implicitly or explicitly used as the measuring sticks, whereas other cultures, groups, and peoples are rendered as if they are small-­scale, residual, inferior, and local (Santos 2014). These other cultures provide data for Western theory. As Escobar put it above, Western theory emerges from a particular local history with a global design that subordinates other histories (Escobar 2013, 36–37; Mignolo 2000). José María Arguedas provides a method of writing, thinking, and doing research on language, language contact, and power that avoids the problems critical sociologists and philosophers associate with disembodied epistemologies and metonymic reason. Arguedas provides an embodied theory and he places Western rationality in tense conflict with other forms of thinking rather than transcendently above other ways of thinking. His work is a counterexample to paradigms that contribute to Western domination.

WALTER BENJAMIN’S TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR Arguedas was brought to an unstable point between languages. This is not true for Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s enigmatic “The Task of the Translator” ([1923] 1969; originally published as the introduction to a German translation of Baudelaire) is among the most cited essays in the academic fields of comparative literature, philosophy of language, and translation studies. Benjamin starts his strange, wonderful article by writing that translatability is an essential quality of certain texts. others, have written powerful critiques of disembodied epistemologies, including Susan Bordo (1993) and Dorothy Smith (1987).

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These texts lean toward translation: a special significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translation. Even if these texts remain untranslated, the potential is always there—­it is not a contingent quality. The “translatability of linguistic creations ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them” (Benjamin [1923] 1969, 70). In these cases, translatability inheres in them as unrealized possibility. Benjamin observes, moreover, that literary creations achieve full growth only through translation. Translating a text gives it a new lease on life; it disseminates the original in the dual sense of spreading it and lending to it a generative “renewal of something living.” The translation lends an “afterlife” to the original. The connection between an original and its translation is vital. Since Benjamin argues that the true significance of certain texts can only be revealed in translation, then it follows that languages are fundamentally interrelated. It is part of the nature of all languages that they are complementary. Counterintuitively, Benjamin leads us away from thinking that transfer of meaning is key to a good translation. Quite the contrary—­for Benjamin a focus on communication is a “hallmark of bad translations.” Instead, Benjamin proposes that translation has a “high purposiveness”: “Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the innermost relationship of languages,” suggesting a “suprahistorical” relationship of languages to each other (Benjamin [1923] 1969, 69, 72). All suprahistorical kinship of language rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole—­an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language. (74)

Translation harmonizes the different languages as it brings them into closer relationship with one another. Benjamin thinks of languages in terms of their mutuality and their “kinship.” Languages come closer and closer to one another as part of their process of becoming. A translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. (78)

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For Benjamin, semantic meaning is less important than the way in which a translation signals that each individual language is part of a greater whole. Or more precisely, the meaning of a particular text gives way to the true and revealed meaning of language as such. Natural languages are “fragments,” broken bits of a shattered bowl. As they are assembled, the unitary language is higher and greater. The unitary language is the direction, and the goal, as Benjamin suggests above, is “the totality of their intentions supplementing one another: pure language.” Benjamin refers to the unity of logos and being.7 “If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language of truth is—­the true language” ([1923] 1969, 77). The ideal purpose of translation is to allow true, pure language to be realized. Benjamin situates translation in terms of its significance for the movement of history, where history is nonreversible and tends toward a certain end. Benjamin’s frame for analysis does not ultimately rest on a specific text and its fate, fortune, or fame. His claims are not empirically based. He has something world-­historical in mind. Unlike some of his later writings, especially his “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin here seems to suggest that history, or at least the history of translation, is teleological.8 The relationship of languages is also metaphysical: “Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express” ([1923] 1969, 72). Benjamin thinks of language and languages in terms of this basic intention that unites them, that defines them as languages. His account is not simply ecumenical; it is almost theological. Benjamin’s argument either presupposes or implies a set of claims, assumptions, or entailments (which contradict Arguedas’s theory at every point):

A. Benjamin discusses translation in universal terms: he speaks of translation in general.

7. An example of this unity of signifying and being: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The word brings the thing into existence. In his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin continues in this vein of locating human language vis-­à-­vis God’s speech (Benjamin 2006). 8. I thank Camille Gagnier and Gisela Brinkler-­Gabler for discussion of this essay in the context of the nonteleological nature of Walter Benjamin’s other works.

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B. Translation occupies a central place in encounters among languages. Translation harmonizes those languages. There is no analysis of the power differentials that obtain among groups of people and how this affects language and the role of language in violent encounters.



C. Benjamin leaves scant space for subjectivity, and certainly little space for individual, historically located speakers. His text points to a messianic subject (de Man 1986, 76; Liu 1995, 14).



D. Benjamin does not theorize the embodied location of the translator.



E. In fact, translators and their agency are made invisible: the activity of translation is sidelined in favor of focusing on qualities intrinsic to texts, such as translatability and the “purposefulness” of translation in bringing languages into interrelation.



F. An omniscient knower, located somewhere beyond language (or located metalinguistically), narrates Benjamin’s text.



G. History is linear, progressive, irreversible, and cohesive, and embraces totality; in short, history is teleological. This is in tension with Benjamin’s own later essay “On the Concept of History” ([1940] 2003).



H. Benjamin removes affect, intersubjective meanings, and conditions experienced by actual speakers, and thus the analysis excludes exploration of the emotional and psychosocial dimensions of speaking a language.



I. The ethical and political dimensions of language contact are sub-



J. Languages are all equivalent as languages.

merged or suppressed.

Both Arguedas and Benjamin see translation as tying languages together—­each language is transformed as it becomes entangled with others through translation. For Arguedas, though, the relationships are contingent, particular, and idiographic. Arguedas is present in the middle of the colonial conjunction of Quechua and Spanish. His method aligns with Lydia Liu: The act of translation, for example, cannot but participate in the performativity of a language that circumscribes and is circumscribed by the historical contingency of that act. Any attempt to historicize above and beyond the circumstances of such performative/constative acts of speech and writing (evocation, translation, citation in and out of context,

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and so on) is bound to lead to the reification of the idea, concept, or theory being analyzed and consequently to the impoverishment of our understanding of historical practice. (Liu 1995, xvii)

Arguedas’s particular analysis of Quechua and Spanish is “circumscribed by the historical contingency of that act.” Benjamin’s approach to translation, since he remains at the level of the universal, leads to a reification of the idea of translation and consequently to an impoverished understanding of historical practice, as Lydia Liu puts it above. Messianic, antiseptic, rarefied: the atmosphere is strictly depersonalized; Benjamin’s essay ought to be called the task of translation, Paul de Man once remarked. Benjamin’s view of language is absent people, even if the creativity is there. Benjamin’s concept of an afterlife, for all its creative richness, is a text-­centered approach.

BEYOND DOMINATION AND RESISTANCE: COLLISION, EXUBERANCE, EFFERVESCENCE The difference between Arguedas and Benjamin is a consequence in part of their respective points of insertion within European modernity. Arguedas is not an outsider to Western theory. The genres in which he writes—­novels, folklore studies, anthropology, linguistics—­are all products of the West. However, he does not obey many of the rules of these genres. He sees himself as intercultural, and his own position moves from one worldview to another and then back, as indicated by his shifting of “we” back and forth between Quechua speakers and Westerners, for example. He indexes and exhibits his own status and production as a cultural worker (Giroux 2005). Arguedas writes a defiant history of difference. That defiant history is marked by mixed emotions, warring tendencies, ambivalence, shifting dispositions and perspectives, and the complex and hybrid linguistic practices of the colonized. In fact, some have even gone so far as to suggest that his suicide could be attributed to the agony of that existential position between languages (see Mignolo 2005, 178). Arguedas renders the translating subject visible without making that subject a liberal individual. Arguedas describes the motivational

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structure of that historical subject, constrained and acting through outside forces. He puts in positive terms how one can think of translation work without separating the text from the body, or the body from history. He can see not only the broad reach of history, from colonization on, but also a history that brings him to a particular position from which he yearns to translate (himself ), and to another singular language in which he desires to communicate himself. Arguedas draws attention to how the act of speaking implicates a process of being in the world, of becoming, and of changing or transforming who one is in the world. Elaborating this process, not only as a cognitive affair but also as lived experience—­a phenomenologically embodied experience of language, a way of inserting oneself in social reality in a new way—­can be extraordinarily difficult. For Arguedas, the phenomenological shift is accompanied by an epistemic shift. This is a key way in which the interactive nature of his exercise demonstrates that he does not consider Spanish and Quechua equivalent—­how could they be, when the world each indexes is so fundamentally different from the other? For example, as a Quechua speaker, Arguedas sees a relationship to the world of things that is spiritually and affectively rich, in which perception and expression always connote whether something is auspicious or inauspicious. The world of perception, subject–object relations, and affect is fundamentally different in Spanish and in Quechua. Arguedas’s contribution is a methodology that takes up the Quechua worldview in a new way. Walter Mignolo puts the point this way: Indian9 [sic] ways of thinking have been “authorized” by Western epistemology as something to be studied (by anthropologists) but not as a source, an energy and a way of thinking. That is, Indian ways of thinking have been de-­legitimized by the colonial difference; particularly by the coloniality of knowledge (e.g., Indian knowledge is non-­sustainable for the progress of an ideal of civilization that was put in place during the European Renaissance and the first colonial expansion of the modern world). Indian ways of thinking have also been de-­legitimized by the coloniality of being: Indians are not rational beings to be taken seriously in their way of thinking and in their thoughts. (2010, xxxiv) 9. Mignolo seems to be referring to people Indigenous to the Americas.

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Arguedas dispenses with this form of epistemicide in which Western theorists treat Indigenous knowledge as raw material. Instead, his methodology locates the knowing subject in his or her situation, subordinated by the depredations of European domination, in this case exercised in part through language. The methodology notices the profound shifts in subjects’ perception of social reality. This account of translation can erode certainty at a deep level of one’s being (Becker 1991). The uncertainty is not intrinsic to translation but rather follows from the approach one takes to translation. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) has commented that all cultures are incomplete. Instead of taking this in the teleological sense that they are all shards to be united (as Benjamin would have it), let’s take this to imply that, in terms of how we live in the world and the sense we make of it, different languages, cultures, histories, can, at the crossroads, point to important truths. We live with different languages imposed on one another, such that multilinguality and translation structure the lives of so many of us, maybe all of us. The existential and linguistic anguish (or exuberance) this provokes is a fate many of us share, even if the particular manifestation is unique to each case. The point of this chapter has not been merely to launch a quixotic battle against universalism in the name of a subalternized particularism, in this case Quechua-­Spanish. Instead, the proposal implicit in Arguedas is to take up alternatives to modernity’s possibilities for doing theory. José María Arguedas illuminates the hidden power of languages that materializes through forced contact. Through that lens, we can see, at the margins, and in ways we could not see from the seat of European theory, the possibilities for networks built from the theoretical proposals of Europe’s others. To treat Arguedas’s work as simply and straightforwardly resistant to epistemicide would be to overlook the extent to which he internalized the idea that Spanish was of universal value while Quechua was not. He championed Quechua and the inventive and creative ways that mestizxs handled both Spanish and Quechua. But Arguedas, enthralled by the possibility of European universalism, wrote off Quechua as devoid of universal possibilities. What if, as Escobar has suggested, the alternative to universalism is not particularism but multiplicity (Mignolo 1995, 310; Escobar 2013)?

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When Arguedas’s work on language is framed as a “reply,” it disrupts the usual terms of European theory—­it disrupts, in short, a monocultural theoretical language that stifles the colonized. Through Arguedas, we recuperate a theory of impure language, a theory of multiplicity rather than universality. When knowledge generated by the Global South is discarded by a knee-­jerk turn to Europe, an opportunity is missed—­knowledge is “wasted,” as Sousa Santos (2014) puts it. “Waste” almost has an aesthetics to it. The aesthetics of Western reason and logic, an aesthetics of purity. Subaltern theory, like subaltern languages, is frequently marked as impure and disorderly. From the standpoint of European order, subaltern theory is perceived, or misperceived, as deficient, abject, and subversive, unstable and destabilizing. Idiosyncratic and arcane. Irrational. This chapter has sought to take up and contribute to recuperating the avowedly impure cocktail José María Arguedas concocts of Quechua and Spanish. The comparison with Benjamin sets the terms of such a trans-­ modern dialogue, rather than a dialogue in which Arguedas or Benjamin is marginal or marginalized. In the next chapter, we will look at the criminalization of translators and their translation work. Then, in the following chapter, we will look at a case that appears at first to be the opposite: the commodification and appropriation of cultural and intellectual production from Latin America by the West. From the ignoring, discarding, and criminalizing of cultural agents and thinkers as a form of epistemicide, we move to fetishization, cultural extractivism, and piracy as epistemicide. In the cases that follow, however, we also take stock of “replies” to European modernity made from outside of Europe, especially those made by Europe’s “others.”

CHAPTER 3 TRANSLATION AS TERRORISM?

AS PART OF THE CONTEMPORARY war on terror, a number of Arab American and Latinx translators and interpreters have been caught up in the criminal justice system in the United States.1 The Department of Homeland Security has monitored, detained, and prosecuted them for their work as translators. In some extreme cases, they have been imprisoned. In other cases, the state demands that translators be complicit—­that they cooperate with and abet the state’s epistemicidal models of criminalizing subaltern people.2 The war on terror has turned translation contact zones into theaters of war (see Apter 2006; Eisenstein 2004, xvi). Specific words or even entire languages are criminalized, as are the translators who work in those languages. Thus, courtroom debate on whether the word jihad can be translated into English turns into a political struggle with legal consequences during a wave of xenophobic and Islamophobic terror. In this context, judges have ruled that translating is not so much an exercise in free speech as an act of abetting terrorists. Framing Arab translators 1. In the cases I examine, court interpreters went back and forth between translating written texts and oral speech. For brevity’s sake, the terms interpreting and translating are used semi-­interchangeably: oral interpretation is sometimes referred to as translation, for example. 2. I thank Matthew Gleeson for this formulation and for discussion of this chapter and its thesis.

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as terrorists or potential terrorists and criminalizing translations from Arabic, Spanish, and other languages imperils communication networks, racializes language, and implies (or even presupposes) that knowledge production from racialized communities is potentially seditious.

“MATERIAL SUPPORT FOR TERROR” Translators are traitors, goes the old saw. Here the cliché is treated as if it were literally true. The Department of Homeland Security has leveled criminal charges against translators, arguing that translation can be material support for terrorism. “Material support” is used here in the legal sense supplied by U.S. statute to include “services” to organizations the government deems terrorist.3 The “material support” clause has been called “the premier statutory tool used to tackle the phenomenon of terrorism in American courtrooms” (W. Said 2015, 51). David Cole (2012) has called it “the centerpiece of the Justice Department’s criminal war on terrorism.” Legal scholars have reviewed many of the constitutional and other law-­related issues these cases raise (see, e.g., W. Said 2015; Abel 2013; Pyetranker 2012; March 2012; D. Cole 2012). The concern of this chapter is slightly different, or at least broader, and includes analysis of how vilifying translators is a mechanism of domination. Criminalizing translators, criminalizing the act of translating itself, and criminalizing the knowledge or information in those translations represent contemporary forms of epistemicide. Criminalizing translation as an activity is particularly insidious because it spreads fear and suspicion in racialized communities. It makes people hesitate before translating, or agreeing to translate, especially texts or discourses related to pressing domestic and overseas questions of war, labor, religion, terror, 3. The statute: 18 U.S.C. § 2339A; 18 U.S.C. § 2339B. The relevant language from the statute reads, “The term ‘material support or resources’ means any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.”

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state terror, immigration, race, criminal justice, and so on. It thus hampers the forming of communities and inhibits community members from speaking about what is happening to them.4 Furthermore, the criminal justice system itself tends to isolate individual people from one another, breaking apart their enmeshment in a community. The prosecution of the war on terror has inculcated fear in immigrant, subaltern, and racialized communities the world over. Making translated knowledge criminally suspect is part of epistemicide in an ongoing historical process of imperialism and racial domination. Analyzing these cases tells us something about state tactics to control competing narratives about state power by intimidating translators and interpreters through selective prosecution that rests on racist tropes. Tarek Mehanna and Mohamed Yousry both served prison time for translating texts (as of this writing, Mehanna is still in prison). In a third case, Erik Camayd-­Freixas, a federal court interpreter, wrote an exposé denouncing how he became implicated in the government’s attempts to criminalize undocumented workers as part of the war on terror. Each of these three cases received a great deal of attention in the media. The New York Times, the Washington Post, street protests and demonstrations, government press conferences, translators’ newsletters, advocacy websites, newspaper opinion pieces and editorials, journalists, academics, pundits, gadflies, advocates, and translators’ and interpreters’ associations all contribute to casting interpreters either as terrorists or as wronged citizens, as domestic subversives or as loyal civil servants caught up in government overreach.

DIFFERENTIAL RACISM AND CRIMINAL ASSEMBLAGES While “Muslim” describes someone of the Islamic faith, in the United States “Muslim” has come to include a raced understanding. In his study “The Racialization of Islam in American Law,” legal scholar Neil Gotanda elaborates, “The raced body is the ‘brown’ body of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East and Central and South Asia” (2011, 184). White supremacy, as it is manifest in law and custom, has rendered 4. I thank Arun Kundnani for this formulation.

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“Muslim” a racial category. Linked to it are the stereotypes of “terrorist,” “spy,” and “saboteur” (Gotanda 2011, 184; Salaita 2006a; E. Said 1994). The law has treated Muslims as “permanent, unassimilable foreigners” (Gotanda 2011, 184). Gotanda and Ian Haney-­López (2006) both point out that for more than 150 years, the U.S. Constitution, immigration legislation, and the courts have served as legal devices to exclude people of Asian and Arab descent or to deny them the right to naturalize as citizens. Given this long, ignoble history, 9/11 marks a crucial turning point of intensification rather than a point of origin for anti-­Arab racism (see, e.g., Salaita 2006b; Volpp 2002; Jamal and Naber 2008). As the introduction and first chapter suggested, the racializing of language and connecting of languages to racialized bodies dates from at least the fifteenth century in Spain and possibly earlier. The tying together of Islam, Arabic, and the people then known as “Moors” (Moros) in a racial nexus dates from the Reconquista, the Iberian wars to unify the peninsula under the Castilian flag in a Catholic kingdom. This racial nexus extended to other parts of Europe and to the colonies. Khyati Joshi remarks: Understanding this concept—­the idea of religious affiliation as an essential human attribute and, being a non-­Christian, an essential and irremediable flaw—­is key to understanding the racialization of religion as it developed in Colonial America during the centuries that followed. (2006, 212)

Contemporary law, just like contemporary action films and the television news, can tap into long-­standing racist tropes to do the work of vilifying Muslims, Arabs, and any other person perceived as either (such as Sikhs, other South Asians, and so on), in order to construct them as su­b­ versive and dangerous (Pulido 2006, 23–­26, 34–­59; Almaguer 2008, 203). Latinxs, in contrast, are often constructed in the racist imagination as gang members, and Latino men are often painted as sexually threatening, while another stereotypical construction frames all Latinxs as simple workers, the salt of the earth, humble and long-­suffering. In any case, Latinxs are constructed as archetypal foreigners and increasingly as criminalized migrants, and therefore as deportable (De Genova 2010; Cacho 2012). This chapter offers three examples of the translational dimension of these racist constructions. In particular, the argument illustrates how the translated language of Arab Americans is perceived to be potentially

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terrorist. In some cases, everyday words in Arabic which can be translated are treated as untranslatable, thus framing them as ominous, exotic, other. In the final case, the translated language of Guatemalans is criminalized at the moment they seek work as undocumented labor. The prosecution of undocumented Latin American workers ties together the war on terror, war on Indigenous people, and the war on immigrants. The overall context of moral panic about terrorism since 9/11 provides an atmosphere that makes a conviction more likely (W. Said 2015). State forces (prosecutors, Homeland Security, the FBI, appellate courts, and even defense lawyers) try to render the defendants passive. The prosecutors do this by transposing the translations into a juridical framework, with its rules for evidence, procedures for hearing testimony, logic of precedent, criterion of mens rea, and so on. Prosecutors combine heterogeneous bits of circumstantial evidence to produce a subject that from the standpoint of the criminal justice system is guilty of supplying material support for a terrorist organization. They develop an “assemblage” in the technical sense of a network of images, bodies, documents, court pronouncements, rhetoric, events, and material objects (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Puar 2017). They build a legal amalgam of translator and translation, text and messenger into a criminal or terrorist assemblage. The assemblage is ad hoc, unstable, and incomplete (Puar 2017; Puar 2008, 217; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; DeLanda 2006; Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat 1980, 631). In response, each of the translators involved grapples with how to exercise some modicum of self-­determination or minimal power during the judicial process. They are not passive, in other words. But the legal process marginalizes their own account of what they are doing. As they both collude with and subvert those imperial structures, these translators and interpreters make those structures visible.

HOMEGROWN “JIHAD” An irony lies at the heart of Tarek Mehanna’s 2009 criminal case. His conviction was based in large part on his translation work, but neither he, nor his prosecutors, nor the judge translated a certain key word, jihad, even though they all subjected this term to enormously contentious (and

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at times one-­sided) exegesis. Unpacking this paradox of untranslatability is crucial to understanding the racialization of language and religion, and a colonial process of pseudotranslation where key subaltern words of opposition can only be understood as insurgent and the insurgent subjects can only be Others. A round-­trip flight to Yemen, where he did not meet anyone or do much of anything, and a few internet postings of homemade translations, including one titled “Thirty-­Nine Ways to Make Jihad.” This was the chief evidence the prosecution presented to support its charge that Tarek Mehanna provided material support for terrorism. These bits of circumstantial evidence were enough in a climate where, as the appellate court put it in the opening words of its 2013 decision on his case, “terrorism is the modern-­day equivalent of the bubonic plague: it is an existential threat.”5 In response, Mehanna’s lawyers observed that the key question was whether a citizen’s political and religious speech may constitute provision of “material support or resources” to a Foreign Terror Organization (FTO) . . . when the government conceded that Petitioner was not instructed by the FTO, and the evidence showed that he did not interact with the FTO, but rather viewed, translated, and disseminated materials of his own choosing.6

“Thirty-­Nine Ways to Make Jihad” is a jejune text of dubious provenance that, as David Cole has pointed out, was already widely available on the Internet in multiple translations. Islamic legal scholar Andrew March has noted that the government contended this text was a “training manual for terrorism.” March asserts: It is nothing of the sort. It is a fairly routine exercise of Islamic jurisprudence explaining to pious Muslims how they can discharge what many of them believe to be a duty to contribute to wars of self-­defense. (2012)

5. United States v. Tarek Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 (1st Cir. 2013) at 40. 6. Petition for Writ of Certiorari, March 17, 2014, United States v. Tarek Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 (1st Cir. 2013), cert. denied (October 6, 2014).

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Among acceptable forms of jihad, “a Muslim can assuage his conscience and take care of widows and children, praise fighters, pray for fighters, become physically fit, learn first aid, learn the Islamic rules of war, have feelings of enmity for one’s enemies, spread news about captives and abandon luxury.” March concludes, “The act of translating this text is far from incitement to violent action. The text in fact shows Muslims numerous ways to help fellow Muslims suffering in their own lands, without engaging in violence. Instead of this common-­sense reading, however, the government did something extraordinary. It used this text of Islamic law to help define for us what should count as a violation of our own material support law” (March 2012). Other Islamic scholars agreed that “jihad” is frequently given a spurious gloss in terrorism trials. “Terrorism cases in the US are not about substantive engagement with Islamic legal issues; they are fundamentally about Muslim identity,” argues legal scholar Lena Salaymeh. The courtroom contributes to manufacturing a politicized product: the “jihadi.” In Arabic, jihad means “to struggle,” mujahid means “the person who struggles,” and “jihadi” is an adjective. In contrast, in contemporary US discourse, a “jihadi” is incorrectly used as a noun to describe a Muslim extremist who uses violence and seeks to implement Islamic law. (Salaymeh 2014)

Jihad, jihadi, and sharia are all pseudo-­untranslatables: that is, they are translatable words that are often maintained in Arabic to preserve their menacing otherness. Mehanna’s trial serves as a case in point for what Salaymeh has observed. Both sides agreed that Mehanna was engaged in "jihad" and that he had translated a text that explained how to wage jihad. But does engaging in jihad or translating a text that explains jihad necessarily amount to material support for terrorism? Tarek Mehanna was born in the United States and grew up in Massachusetts. In high school, he became a devout Muslim. After high school, he matriculated in a pharmacy program. However, he quit school in the middle of a college semester and went to Yemen. Mehanna made this trip, the prosecution alleged, “with the specific intent of providing material support to al-­Qa’ida, knowing or intending that this support would be

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used in a conspiracy to kill persons abroad.”7 In particular, the prosecution claimed he was looking for a terrorist training camp but conceded that he did not in fact find one. Mehanna argued that he was not looking for any such camp; he had merely gone to Yemen for religious study. All parties agreed that he came back shortly thereafter without having gone to any training camp. FBI agents subsequently approached him several times to try and turn him into an informant, but by all accounts, he rebuffed their offers. In 2005, “the defendant began to translate Arab-­ language materials into English and post his translations on a website—­ at-­Tibyan—­that comprised an online community for those sympathetic to al-­Qa’ida and Salafi-­Jihadi perspectives,” as the appeals court put it.8 Though Mehanna did not have any direct contact with al-­Qaeda or its operatives, he made a number of statements to his “co-­conspirators” that the court found incriminating. In 2011, a jury found him guilty of providing material support to a terrorist organization and the court sentenced him to seventeen years in prison. In his appeal, Mehanna claimed his conviction was based on an ad hoc amalgam of circumstantial evidence. Moreover, argued Mehanna, the prosecution used a guilt-­by-­association strategy that piled on a pastiche of graphic violence from terrorist acts throughout the world unrelated to Mehanna. For example, the prosecutor was allowed to screen for the jury the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl, which was unrelated to any of Mehanna’s alleged activities. This kind of provocative material was prejudicial to an extent that outweighed any possible probative value.9 The Appellate Court for the First Circuit upheld the trial verdict. The court observed that the jury convicted him for a “cluster of activities.”10 They noted that his short, unsuccessful trip to Yemen was one damning piece of evidence. “The second cluster of activities” for which he was convicted was “translation-­centric,” as the appeals court put it. The charge of conspiracy to provide or attempt to provide material support to terrorists tied the collage of activities together. 7. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 46. 8. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 41. 9. I thank Mohammad Fadel for this formulation (oral communication). 10. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 50.

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While acknowledging that the guilty verdict did emerge from this ad hoc collection of details, the appeals court refused to parse the trial court’s decision or gainsay how the jury arrived at its conclusion (Lederman 2013). Citing J. K. Rowling (if a bit flippantly), Judge Bruce M. Selya, in his decision, wrote: It is pointless to speak in the abstract of a verdict predicated on protected conduct. The Court of Appeals is not a sorting hat, divining which criminal defendants’ stories fall into constitutionally protected and unprotected stacks. Instead, an appellate court’s role is to discern what, if any, errors marred the trial below. This inquiry requires us to focus on the relevant actors in the trial and not to engage in an untethered academic analysis of the verdict itself.11

Instead, much of the appellate court’s argument rested on the meaning of the word jihad, the translation of which was key in Mehanna’s conviction. In his closing statement at trial, Mehanna granted that he was involved in jihad. According to him, however, jihad is struggle. Mehanna implied that the translations were actions: they were part of the fight against U.S. imperialism. As a child growing up in the United States, he said, he looked at Batman as his hero. Batman operated in a paradigm—­ Mehanna used the term “paradigm”—­in which there are oppressors, oppressed, and those “who step up to defend the oppressed.” This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm—­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye. (Mehanna 2012)

Resisting any effort to paint him as foreign or exotic, Mehanna emphasized that his political outlook was formed in the United States, where he was born and raised: “It’s because of America that I am who I am.” Mehanna saw himself in this tradition of American insurgents from Tom Paine onward who fought against oppression: “Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces—­an insurgency we now 11. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 47.

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celebrate as the American revolutionary war.” Learning from this tradition formed part of his education as an American. As a kid I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh. (Mehanna 2012)

His theory of jihad emerged from this view of history. Paul Revere—­when he jumped on a horse and went on his midnight ride, it was for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minutemen. By the time they got to Concord, they found the Minutemen waiting for them, weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat them. From that battle came the American Revolution. (Mehanna 2012)

The patriots who fought in the American Revolution were waging jihad. There’s an Arabic word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. It was a word repeated many times in this courtroom. That word is: jihad, and this is what my trial was about. . . . Muslims who were defending themselves against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did to America. (Mehanna 2012)

He saw jihad as part of the freedom struggle in the legacy of Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. Mehanna evoked a strongly secularist account of jihad linked to the history of Black struggle, socialist politics, and other progressive battles, individual and collective, against imperialism, from British domination in the colonial period until today.12 12. I would like to thank Rita Kothari for this thought.

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On the subject of jihad, the appeals court held a view that was the polar opposite of Mehanna’s: While “jihad” is a linguistically protean term that may encompass both violent and nonviolent acts, the record makes clear that the defendant used the term to refer to violent jihad—­and that is the meaning that we ascribe to it throughout this opinion.13

It is not entirely clear on what basis the court came to this conclusion; it provided no evidence to support this conclusion. Legal scholar Lena Salaymeh comments on how “seemingly innocuous acts—­such as not translating terms—­contribute to a systemic and pernicious phenomenon.” Not translating an easily translatable term results in confusing several distinctive meanings: revolutionary, resistance fighter, guerrilla fighter, rebel, mercenary, militia member, or extremist. The untranslated term indicates that an individual is Muslim, but provides no information about his situation, beliefs, or acts. Consequently, the “jihadi” product facilitates a process by which US courts treat individuals—­including US citizens—­not as civilians, but as ill-­defined “terrorists.” (This is part of a broader practice of assuming or concocting causal links between Islam, terrorism, and Muslim minorities.) (Salaymeh 2014)

The question, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, is who is master of the meaning of words. The debate between Mehanna and the appeals court over jihad was an unequal fight between insurgent and counterinsurgent rhetoric in the context of U.S. imperialism. In colonial struggles, Ranajit Guha pointed out several decades ago, any particular language is so constituted that “for each of its signs we have an antonym, a counter-­message, in another code” (1988b, 58). Guha took as his point of departure a passage from Mao Zedong describing how, for the bourgeoisie, revolutionary activity is “terrible!” whereas for the rural proletariat, “It’s fine!” (Mao [1927] 1975). “What comes out of the interplay of these mutually implied but opposed matrices,” explained 13. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 42.

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Guha, “is that our texts are not the record of observations uncontaminated by bias, judgement, and opinion. On the contrary, they speak of a total complicity.” A code which contains the signifier for the subaltern practice of “turning things upside down” is matched by its opposite—­ “that is, counter-­insurgency.” A freedom fighter for the oppressed looks like an extremist or fanatic to those in power. Guha concluded, “The antagonism between the two is irreducible and there is nothing in this to leave room for neutrality” (1988b, 58–­59). Here the irreducible antagonism is over the meaning of the word jihad.14 Beyond the semantic debate lies a pragmatic one: is “translating” acting or speaking? The court held that words are deeds: the First Amendment protection of speech did not protect Mehanna’s speech because that speech was a service for a terrorist organization. In explaining its logic, the appellate court recognized that “the context made clear that the government’s ‘translations-­as-­material-­support’ theory was premised on the concept that the translations comprised a ‘service,’ which is a form of material support [for terrorists] within the purview of the statute.”15 Mehanna contended in contrast that he was simply exhorting Muslims to defend themselves, and that translating texts is constitutionally protected. This was a struggle in part over the function of words: Were they a “service” to terrorists or were they a call to self-­defense? Were the translated words material aid or protected speech? The courts lent an ontological reality to the symbolic: his crime posed an existential threat, as the appellate court put it. They lent materiality to language. The courts attributed to words the status of deeds and saw the ideas residing in the translation materialized and embodied in Mehanna. Conscious of the criminal stakes, Mehanna saw his language as protected speech and as deeds. He shifted the logic of his position depending on the context and what would be advantageous to him, a man racialized as nonwhite caught in the war on terror. Critical race theorist Mari Matsuda might call this ability to shift positions tactically and strategically “multiple consciousness as jurisprudential method” (1989, 7–­10). He was .

14. Reducing “jihad” to the jihad of violent groups like ISIS has become widespread and is quite common in the American media (see, e.g., Creswell and Haykel 2015). 15. Mehanna, 735 F.3d 32 at 49.

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trying out different logics to exculpate himself while maintaining the integrity of his activity (W. Said 2015). The tussle over the semantics of jihad was a local skirmish in the war on terror. Thus, given the power arrayed against him, the outcome of the legal case may have been a foregone conclusion: Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen years in prison for providing material support to a terrorist organization. Treating the word—­and the concept—­jihad as untranslatable in this legal context implied criminalizing and racializing the translator who saw himself as engaged in jihad. The tools for criminalizing the translator included legal actions (charges, plea deals, evidentiary rulings), police actions (wiretapping, detention), the framing of translation activities as material evidence with probative value to show terrorist intent, and the use of untranslated terms as a means to tap into age-­old specters of the dangerous Arab Other (E. Said 1994; Salaita 2006a, 2006b).

COURT INTERPRETING AND TERRORIST CONSPIRACIES The government used a similar strategy on an interpreter who was quite different from Tarek Mehanna, both ideologically and in terms of his professional placement. In constructing a criminalized racial assemblage, however, prosecutors also cast Mohamed Yousry as a subversive Arab.16 In the early 2000s, Mohamed Yousry was a graduate student in history at New York University. The courts contracted him through a private firm to translate in the pretrial phase of the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel-­Rahman, jailed on terrorism charges. Abdel-­Rahman’s lawyers, including celebrated cause attorney Lynne Stewart, were impressed with Yousry’s work, and they contracted him to interpret for lawyer–client conferences during the trial and to serve as a cultural consultant (Hess 2014). His academic advisor at NYU, historian Zachary Lockman, later wrote in the Los Angeles Times that he 16. Court records and public documents list conflicting spellings of Mr. Yousry’s first name. My understanding is that his chosen spelling is Mohamed (Maya Hess, personal communication), so I generally spell his name that way, except when it is spelled otherwise in quoted documents.

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urged Yousry to take advantage of the opportunity: “When Mohammed began to discuss possible doctoral dissertation topics with me seven or eight years ago, I encouraged him to write a political biography of Abdel-­Rahman, partly because his employment as a translator for Stewart gave him unique access to the imprisoned cleric” (Lockman 2006). And elsewhere, Lockman said, “I guess I’m responsible in a very sad way for the trouble he’s in” (quoted in Powell and Garcia 2006). Lockman convinced Yousry that interpreting for Sheik Abdel-­Rahman would be a good way to get data for his dissertation. Lockman knew that Yousry had no ideological affinity with Abdel-­Rahman: “Though a lifelong secularist and democrat who totally rejects Abdel Rahman’s extremist version of Islam, Mohammed started gathering material on the cleric for his dissertation, and even interviewed him about his ideas and political career during government-­authorized prison visits with Stewart” (Lockman 2006). Given that the sheik was the alleged leader of a terrorist ring, the court placed the defense team under a gag order (technically termed a special administrative measure) not to pass along messages from the sheik (Hess 2014, 10–­11, 17). Yousry, since he was the court interpreter and not a lawyer, claimed he followed the instructions of the sheik’s lawyer, Lynne Stewart, and interpreted for the sheik, including translating written messages. In the language of a court that heard Stewart’s appeal: On May 19 and 20, 2000, Stewart visited Abdel Rahman in the Rochester facility. There [Abdel-­Rahman] dictated several messages to Stewart’s translator and co-­defendant, Mohammed Yousry, including a letter to an al-­Gama’a lawyer who favored the cease-­fire, asking him to allow others in al-­Gama’a to criticize it, and another to [a leader of the group] asking him to “escalate the language” of criticism of the cease-­fire. Stewart smuggled these messages out of the prison.17

This second lawyer was apparently Abdel-­Rahman’s legal representative in Egypt. Relying on surreptitious audio recordings the FBI had made of Stewart and Abdel-­Rahman’s lawyer–client interviews, the prosecution presented evidence of other examples when (prosecutors alleged) Yousry, 17. United States v. Lynne Stewart, 10–­3185 (2d Cir. 2012).

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Stewart, and Abdel-­Rahman conspired to transmit messages to and from people in the outside world. In April 2002, federal agents arrested Yousry and Stewart. The criminal act with which they were charged was conveying the sheik’s messages. Since Stewart did not speak Arabic, they had to indict Yousry for the charge against her to stick. At trial, Yousry argued that he was acting in his capacity as a legal interpreter. He was only following the instructions of Lynne Stewart in translating certain documents, and since he was not a legal expert, he was not in a position to evaluate whether it was legal for him to translate these documents, nor could he control what Stewart did with them (Dundy 2005; Bierman 2006). In 2006, in United States v. Mohammed Yousry, the interpreter was convicted of conspiring to defraud the United States (by violating the gag order) and conspiring to provide and conceal material support for terrorist activity through his translation work. One court interpreter who sat in on his trial later wrote in Yousry’s defense, “He never spoke to any of the Shaykh’s followers or even to the press. . . . Under oath at the trial, Mohamed Yousry testified that he opposes Islamic fundamentalism as a regressive force that would be particularly injurious to women and minorities, such as Coptic Christians in Egypt” (Dundy 2005, 6). Professor Lockman had already confirmed publicly that Yousry’s study was purely academic. Yet the prosecutor used his graduate school research material as evidence against him, including newspaper clippings, underlined passages in texts, and so on: “Among government exhibits of ‘evidence’ against him were slides of his extensive library, including books about Egypt and terrorism and the Islamic Group” (Dundy 2005). Yousry’s interpreting notes, a conventional aide-­mémoire for professional interpreters, were also entered into evidence against him (Hess 2014, 171). From the trial transcript: MR. MORVILLO: Your Honor, the 2415–­6 are handwritten notes in Arabic and English taken by Mr. Yousry during the March 1999 prison visit, at least that’s what it appears to be, and would be offered as statements of coconspirators in furtherance of the conspiracy charged in Count 1. (quoted in Hess 2014, 171)

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The Yousry case instigated a bitter and fractious polemic among professional court interpreters. During the trial, the director of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators (NAJIT) published a statement accusing Yousry of violating the norms and ethics of neutrality. Many would later find fault with NAJIT for not coming to his aid (Apter 2006; Bierman 2006). The American Translators Association seemed to stay neutral, simply restating its code of ethics for court translators, which many observers interpreted as at best abandoning Yousry and at worst implying he had broken his oath. National trade newsletters such as the American Translators Association Chronicle and local ones like the Gotham Translator (Dundy 2005; Bierman 2006) ran acrimonious letters and articles from both sides. Several academics, including NYU literature professor Emily Apter and Yousry’s advisor, Zachary Lockman, sprang to his defense. As we have seen, Lockman emphasized how Yousry was engaged in an academic study. He defended Yousry’s actions in an op-­ed for the Los Angeles Times: Whatever Stewart may have done, however, it is hard to see how Mohammed can be held responsible for [Stewart’s] actions. As a government-­ approved translator, he was never even asked to agree to the regulations Stewart was accused of violating, and he had no reason to question the lawfulness of his employer’s instructions. Should a translator be sent to prison for following his employer’s instructions, especially when the prosecution failed to prove that he intended to break any law? Can a graduate student’s dissertation research reasonably be construed as contributing to a conspiracy to help terrorists? Yousry had no legal training and translated nothing without instruction from defense lawyers. (Lockman 2006)

In a newsletter of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), the academic association he had served as president, Lockman argued that the case held consequences both for academic and civic freedoms. The lesson I draw from Mohamed’s case is that for all of us in MESA, both as individuals and as stakeholders in a wide range of institutions, our ability to pursue our vocations as scholars and educators today cru-

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cially depends on the vigorous defense of rights and freedoms that most of us long assumed that we could take for granted. (Lockman 2007)

Emily Apter similarly drew larger lessons: “The Yousry case, and similar trials-­by-­language, confirm . . . that the current drive to monolingualization in the United States serves to consolidate the ideological pairing of cultural isolationism and political unilateralism” (2006). Scholar and professional interpreter Maya Hess debunked the theory that Yousry was a rogue interpreter in her exhaustive doctoral dissertation on his trial (Hess 2014). Hess agreed with Apter and Lockman on the basis of the evidence that “this suggests that scholarly expertise in the field of terrorism has been reconceived as ‘dangerous knowledge’ and academic freedom has been curtailed” (Hess 2014, 14). Not all academics sided with Yousry. Curiously, an academic equivalent of the prosecutors’ argument can be found in a pair of articles by Ghada Osman and Claudia Angelelli (Angelelli and Osman 2007; Osman and Angelelli 2011). On the basis of their examination of the lawyer-­client meetings that the FBI secretly recorded, Osman and Angelelli provided evidence that Yousry engaged in extended exchanges with the sheik in which he offered advice and promised to contact outsiders in express violation of the court’s gag order—­an order, it bears emphasizing, he had not signed. Some of these conversations Yousry did not immediately translate for Stewart (though he may have subsequently—­see below). In making a case for the interpreter’s agency, the authors arguably went a bridge too far by constructing Yousry as “creating” “Arabic-­centered cultural phenomena” and an “Arabic-­centered discourse,” “effectively marginalizing” counsel Lynne Stewart (Osman and Angelelli 2011; Angelelli and Osman 2007). By arguing that Yousry exercised agency, Angelelli and Osman made an important point, often lost in naïve descriptions of interpreters: they critiqued the idea that interpreters are and should be neutral. Instead, Angelelli and Osman argued that interpreters exercise agency; they should be considered “active interlocutors” rather than simply machines that transmit language faithfully without influencing the message (Osman and Angelelli 2011, 3). But in the context of the war on terror, Angelelli and Osman’s claims that this interpreter controlled the situation risked identifying Mr. Yousry as a criminal mastermind in a terrorist plot.

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In imposing their cultural context on Stewart through their use of an Arabic-­centered discourse [sic], Yousry and Abdel-­Rahman created an environment that appears mundane and pedestrian to the outsider but is in fact rife with manifestations of power relations. (Osman and Angelelli 2011, 4)

Although they acknowledged “today’s politically charged climate” (1), Osman and Angelelli did not seem to see the irony or the danger of casting Yousry in a starring role in a case of criminal conspiracy. Indeed, Angelelli and Osman gestured darkly at how Yousry and Abdel-­ Rahman “impose” their “cultural context” on Stewart—­simply through speaking Arabic (which they term “Arabic-­centered discourse”). Osman and Angelelli did not seem to realize, as Maya Hess has convincingly shown based on trial transcripts, that Yousry and Lynne Stewart had often agreed ahead of time on which texts Yousry would translate in situ and which he would translate later, in order to save crucial time, since their visiting time was limited. Stewart explained the process under oath at the trial: We had developed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center a method whereby on the outside we would go over all the material, myself with Mr. Yousry. I would say to him, this is approved, do this, read that, do the letters, get the answers to the letters and you do that without having to translate back to me every word that’s said. Because it was many times just duplicative of what I had read earlier and had translated to me by Yousry. Yousry had to translate twice, unfortunately, but that we felt was preferable to wasting time whereby he would read, I would get the answer, I would question, he would read again, I would get the answer. It just speeded up the process a great deal. (quoted in Hess 2014, 92–­93)

Since this procedure might appear suspicious to the correctional officers who observed them through glass, they would act as if he were interpreting: “We also realized that it might look peculiar sometimes that he [Yousry] was seeming to carry on long conversations with the Sheikh without my intervening” (quoted in Hess 2014, 93). They consciously engaged in subterfuge. From the FBI transcripts:

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STEWART : I can get an Academy Award for it. YOUSRY : She is saying, Sir[,] that she can get an award in acting. [All laugh.] All right, fine now, they [the corrections officers] stepped back. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, surveillance tape, quoted in Hess 2014, 94–­95)

Osman and Angelelli’s contention that Yousry controlled the exchange, in other words, rests too narrowly on the surreptitious FBI recordings while they exclude the important overall context, such as prearrangements between the lawyer and interpreter. Far from being marginalized, then, Stewart was arguably in control of the situation. While using subterfuge to hide this method may have been imprudent of Stewart and Yousry, it was not criminal. This was Yousry’s argument under direct examination by his lawyer at trial. Q : At the time you were asked to pretend to translate from time to time, did you believe that you were doing anything that was particularly wrong? YOUSRY : Stupid, yes. Wrong, no. Q : Did you, your own state of mind, believe that anything that was being discussed during the visit was, in any way, improper, proper? What was your point of view? YOUSRY : No. I believed as long as a lawyer was in the room and a lawyer was telling me what to do, that was the proper thing to do. I did that with Mr. Clark, Mr. Jabara and Ms. Stewart. Q : Did it ever occur to you that you were committing a fraud on the government? YOUSRY : Absolutely not. (quoted in Hess 2014, 96)

Just because it was ill-­considered, in other words, does not make it criminal. Starting from the same premise of the power of the translator, Emily Apter concluded the opposite of what Angelelli and Osman did: though translators and interpreters wield power and agency, Yousry was innocent. Interpreting is not a neutral activity; nevertheless, the poisoned post-­9/11 atmosphere was to blame for his conviction, not his conduct. The Yousry case illustrated the unique ability of translators to determine the course of war, the dependency of reporters and soldiers on translators for survival in risky

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war zones, the targeting of translators by governments and political factions alike (especially when perceived as defectors to an enemy or whistleblowers), the impossibility of a neutral position as soon as one acts as a transmitter of information; and the rank fear of translators as potential traitors or double agents. (Apter 2006)

We could add Islamophobia and moral panic about Arabs and the Arabic language as other sources of the rank fear that accompanied Yousry’s trial. With the exception of Osman and Angelelli, scholarly analyses and coverage in the mainstream press were largely sympathetic to Yousry. At the conclusion of the trial, the Washington Post published a long review article titled “Translator’s Conviction Raises Legal Concerns: Trial Transcripts Show Lack of Evidence” (Powell and Garcia 2006); as the article observes of Yousry: He passed rigorous federal security clearance checks. A PhD candidate at New York University, Yousry harbored no affinity for Rahman, writing that the cleric promoted “Muslim totalitarianism.”

If the government’s aim was to intimidate, then the favorable coverage, pointing out contradictions in the prosecution’s case and raising a metaphorical eyebrow at the draconian sentences handed out to Yousry and Stewart, may have just furthered the suspicion that the bar was low to convict someone in the war on terror. Even the prosecutor conceded in his closing statement, “Yousry is not a practicing Muslim. He is not a fundamentalist. . . . Mohammed Yousry is not someone who supports or believes in the use of violence” (Powell and Garcia 2006). This was a balanced, accurate statement by the prosecutor that Yousry was a moderate. However, it should not be considered an eleventh-­hour, change-­ of-­heart defense of Yousry; instead, this revealing statement shows how little the prosecutor needed to do to win his case. It is hard not to come to the conclusion that this was an attack on civil liberties, on Arabic, and on Arabs. It was also an attack on translators and their work. “Yousry’s case,” argued Apter (2006), “reveals how non-­translation, mistranslation, and the translator’s positioning as both enemy and friend, have figured center-­stage throughout the Iraq war and the U.S. government’s domestic surveillance of terrorist suspects.”

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CRIMINALIZING UNDOCUMENTED WORKERS IN THE NAME OF THE WAR ON TERROR Translators and interpreters are implicated in the war on terror in yet another way. They routinely participate in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) criminal proceedings linked to border enforcement. In the final case in this chapter, a court interpreter felt complicit with prosecutors in criminalizing undocumented workers as part of the war on terror, although he was not himself a target. He wrote afterward about how he was drawn into a prosecution he concluded was fundamentally unfair. On May 12, 2008, in Postville, Iowa, ICE conducted the largest immigration raid in U.S. history to date.18 Immigration authorities detained nearly 400 workers, including 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis, and 4 Ukrainians. Among them were at least 23 minors and 56 mothers who were forced to leave their children unattended when they were arrested. Officials found numerous labor violations at the kosher meat-­ packing plant where the raid occurred, including the use of child labor, unsanitary conditions, and widespread sexual harassment, including rape, of women working at the plant. The raid was covered extensively in the press (see, e.g., Duara, Petroski, and Schulte 2008). Erik Camayd-­Freixas had worked for almost twenty-­five years as an interpreter for the federal court system and the U.S. Department of Justice when the government called him to interpret for undocumented Central Americans arrested in the raid. When he accepted the job, Camayd-­ Freixas did not know what kind of case he was accepting. He later bitterly 18. The number of “removals,” deportations that involve compulsory expulsions from the United States after a legal process ending in an order of removal (with criminal or administrative sanctions placed on any subsequent reentry), has risen enormously since 2008. The federal government distinguishes removals from “returns,” which involve expelling people without a legal order. After Obama took power, removals reached unprecedented heights, to over 400,000 in 2012 and 2013. Statistics through 2020 (the latest available as of this writing) suggest that the number of removals may have fallen since then. See “Number of Aliens Removed or Returned from the United States from 1990 to 2020,” Statista, April 25, 2022, https://​www​.statista​.com/​statistics/​667556/​us​-­­number​-o­­ f​-­­alien​-­­removals​-­­and​-­­returns/; and “Yearbook of Immigration Statistics 2020: Table 39: Noncitizens Removed or Returned: Fiscal Years 1892 to 2020,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, last updated December 8, 2021, accessed April 25, 2022, https://w ​ ww.​ dhs.​ gov/i​ mmigration-​ ­­statistics/​yearbook/​2019/​table39.

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regretted his participation. As a form of expiation, perhaps, he then detailed every step of the legal process in several published accounts and in congressional testimony. In fact, his is the only step-­by-­step, firsthand account of the raid and subsequent trials and deportations; indeed, as he pointed out, the interpreters were “the only officers of the court who were present at every step of this fast-­tracking operation, including the interviews at the jail” (Camayd-­Freixas 2008b, 2). Though he came to have a deep aversion to the government’s pursuit of convictions in this case, Camayd-­Freixas was hardly a radical at the beginning of the process. He commented to a newspaper, “I’ve been associated with the federal court for twenty-­three years. And I’m very protective of the federal court. I’ve always seen it as a bastion of justice” (Camayd-­Freixas 2009). He also had a rather traditional or orthodox understanding of his role as interpreter, in that he insisted he was neutral and unbiased throughout. He testified to Congress that “I maintained an impartial position throughout the proceedings and I remain impartial today” (Camayd-­Freixas 2008b, 3). When Camayd-­Freixas first arrived in Iowa in 2008, just hours after the raid, government agents brought him to the state fairground they had turned into a temporary detention center, much to the dismay of local officials. A heavily militarized and penal atmosphere prevailed. Scores of ICE police, FBI agents, and US Marshals in flack vests, some carrying assault weapons, patrolled the entire compound. In short, it was a pocket Guantánamo. . . . All seemed like a bullish overkill, if the purpose was to process simple meatpackers: the massive multiagency mobilization, the military-­style logistics, the deployment of a federal field court—­unless of course it was a dress rehearsal for some kind of immigration Armageddon. (Camayd-­Freixas 2013, 50)

Camayd-­Freixas waited in the courtroom. “Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed” (53). Agents brought in groups of ten workers, “chains dragging as they shuffled through.” “They appeared to be uniformly no more than five feet tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan family names, various Tajtajs, Xicays, Sajchés, Sologuís” (53–­54).

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They all appeared to speak Spanish, a few rather laboriously, as the interpreters were able to ascertain in the following days. At that moment it dawned on me that, aside from the Guatemalan or Mexican “nationality” imposed on their ancestors, they too were First Americans, in shackles. They were the descendants of ethnic groups that migrated freely across the continent for centuries and established great civilizations before the first European ever set foot in the New World. Now shackled and humiliated, they stood out in stark racial contrast with the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court. “Sad spectacle,” I heard a colleague mutter, reading my mind. Indeed, they looked like slaves. I wondered at that moment how we ever came to this as a nation. (54)

Several men and women were weeping, but Camayd-­Freixas’s attention was particularly drawn to two women. One of them was sobbing and would repeatedly struggle to bring a sleeve to her nose, but her wrists shackled around her waist simply would not reach; so she just dripped until she was taken away with the rest. The scene was below the dignity of the federal court. . . . Yet nobody was helping this chained woman in severe emotional distress. I found the scene so disturbing that I had trouble carrying on with my interpretation. I wanted to stand up and ask the magistrate to order some assistance for this woman, but it was not my place, and ultimately I did not have the courage. (60)

Camayd-­Freixas felt that the proceedings amounted to a tragic farce—­a travesty in which he was deeply implicated. I felt like a fool interpreting over and over the words, “You have the presumption of innocence,” to defendants who were all chained and shackled and were being denied even the right to a bail hearing. (56)

Yet things got worse, as far as he was concerned. Prosecutors, working with ICE, charged most of the people with a felony count of identity theft for using false social security numbers. Camayd-­Freixas felt this was a miscarriage on several counts. Guilt in a

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case of identity theft requires intent to defraud and to engage in identity theft. Yet “many did not know what a Social Security number is or what purposes it serves.” Thus, “because ‘intent’ was an element of each of the charges, many were probably not guilty.” “Aggravated identity theft” . . . just did not fit at all with the personality, culture, and level of education of these defendants. It was simply incongruous at plain sight for anyone who has had any previous contact with Latin American rural culture. The concept itself proved impossible to convey to them in any language. (Camayd-­Freixas 2013, 54)

While it would be hard to quibble with Camayd-­Freixas’s assessment of the challenges for Indigenous people caught up in a deeply alien legal system, some of his language is troubling. Although his sympathy with the defendants is clear throughout, it is hard not to hear condescension when he relates that it was impossible to convey the idea of identity theft “in any language” or when he characterizes them (as he does repeatedly) as illiterate peasants. As the proceedings moved along, Camayd-­Freixas found he was unable to convey the judges’ and lawyers’ questions. Many defendants did not appear to understand their charges or rights, insisting that they were in jail for being in the country illegally (and not for document fraud or identity theft) and insisting that they had no rights. (Camayd-­Freixas 2008b, 3)

Camayd-­Freixas concluded that many were also having trouble navigating Spanish as a second language. For these reasons, he felt that the legal conditions for a fair trial or due process were not present. The prosecution offered a plea agreement: in exchange for a guilty plea, each person would serve five months in federal prison and then be deported as a criminal. The detainees thus faced two sets of charges: criminal charges of identity theft and immigration violations. If they pled not guilty, they might spend up to two years awaiting a trial, and if they lost at trial, they would face a much longer sentence. They were given only a week to decide before the offer expired (Camayd-­Freixas 2013). As is common in immigration hearings, the defendants were not provided

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with free immigration lawyers, though they were given public defenders for the criminal charge, so most had no legal counsel on how to evaluate the immigration charges. All this generated an ethical conflict for Camayd-­Freixas. One of the men for whom Camayd-­Freixas interpreted captured the inner conflict. A defense lawyer asked the man through Camayd-­Freixas if he knew what a social security number was, since his work application had a false number. The man replied, “At the plant, they helped me fill out the papers ’cause I can’t read or write Spanish, much less English” (Camayd-­Freixas 2013, 62). Still, the lawyer recommended he submit a guilty plea. If he pled not guilty, he would be held for much longer than if he submitted a plea of guilty. All the defendants were in this same catch-­22. The man was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he said, “so you can do whatever you want with me.” To him we were part of the same system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for five months. None of the “options” really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. . . . I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be “poisoned.” His spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: “God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine.” As I translated, the lawyer recoiled and her eyes watered. Like a kick in the gut, there was our conflict of interest, well stated by a weeping, illiterate man. (Camayd-­Freixas 2008a, 6)

The undocumented workers were in an impossible situation. Many of these workers were sole earners begging to be deported, desperate to feed their families, for whom every day counted. “If you want to see your children or don’t want your family to starve, sign here”—­ this is what their deal amounted to. Their Plea Agreement was coerced. (Camayd-­Freixas 2013, 56)

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Camayd-­Freixas added, “Their decision both to waive grand jury indictment or other rights and to plead guilty, was solely based on which was the fastest way to get back home and look after their families. Nothing else had any real meaning” (2008b, 5). Interpreting under these conditions put Camayd-­Freixas himself in a contradictory situation. As I interpreted, I often saw these poor peasants look over toward the defense table for that last reassuring nod from their lawyers, before uttering their guilt in perjury. Dozens of times I had to interpret the words, “Yes, I’m guilty,” when I knew perfectly well that they were false. By just doing my job to the letter, I was dishonoring my oath of accuracy and impartiality and facilitating fraud being perpetrated upon the court. (Camayd-­Freixas 2013, 64)

Professional codes of ethics that obligated him to translate the words accurately conflicted with his perception that there was a conceptual rift between the court’s understanding of guilt, intent, culpability, and so on, and what the defendants meant when they pled guilty; they lacked the intent to engage in identity theft, and they pled out simply because they wanted to expedite the entire procedure and shorten their jail stay. Utterances that do not express guilt—­cannot express guilt by the court’s rules and standards—­are instead taken as confessions of guilt or guilty pleas. This is what translation amounted to in this strange, distended juridical space marked by a racial line that was also a colonial line. His duty to translate across this gap caused him no small measure of moral dissonance. He was so offended by government treatment of these workers at their criminal trial and deportation hearings that when he got home he wrote a long report, detailing how in his view government agents had not followed due process, or had potentially abused due process, in forcing a plea agreement. He circulated his account informally. This led to a New York Times article (Preston 2008). The article examined the professional and legal ethics of Camayd-­Freixas’s disclosure of privileged information he had acquired while interpreting and also the substantive issues that had so outraged him. The United States Congress invited Camayd-­ Freixas to testify at a subcommittee meeting. He began writing and

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speaking widely against immigration policy and authored a book, US Immigration Reform and Its Global Impact: Lessons from the Postville Raid (2013). Camayd-­Freixas provided a complicated frame: he claimed neutrality, but he acknowledged how moved he was by the migrants caught up in the criminal justice system. He thought that the court interpreter was a unique figure in the courtroom in identifying with (in the sense of empathizing with) the different court actors. He saw racism and later denounced it, yet he used patronizing language to describe the people he was championing. Through that complex lens, Camayd-­Freixas presented a set of contradictions in the prosecution of the migrants. As he registered these unfolding tensions, he was moved from his position of neutrality to a politicized role in denouncing the courts and the Department of Homeland Security. He was haunted by his experience and felt bad in particular for what he felt were occasional lapses in moral courage: “When I got home, I felt a certain amount of guilt for having participated in such a procedure. I felt dirty” (Camayd-­Freixas 2009). He noted that never before had “illegal immigration been criminalized in this fashion” (Camayd-­Freixas 2008a, 11). In struggling to come up with a rationale for why DHS would prosecute these workers so aggressively, he turned to its overall raison d’être. Homeland Security had grown enormously since it began in 2003, and “ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources, and ballooning budget.” Simply put, the criminalization of illegal workers is just a cheap way of boosting ICE “criminal alien” arrest statistics. But after Postville, it is no longer a matter of clever paperwork and creative accounting: 130 man-­ years of time were handed down pursuant to a bogus charge. (Camayd-­ Freixas 2008a, 13)

This was consistent with a shift in legal strategy initiated under the George W. Bush administration that continued through Obama and after: deport people through removal (which has more long-­term legal consequences) instead of simply returning people who were caught in the United States

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without proper documentation.19 The criminalization of undocumented people was part of the new wave of deportations, while deportations took place increasingly within the framework of the war on terror. According to its new paradigm, the agency fancies that it can conflate the diverse aspects of its operations and pretend that immigration enforcement is really part and parcel of the “war on terror.” This way, statistics in the former translate as evidence of success in the latter. Thus, the Postville charges—­document theft and identity theft—­treat every illegal alien as a potential terrorist, and with the same rigor. At sentencing, as I interpreted, there was one condition of probation that was entirely new to me: “You shall not be in possession of an explosive artifact.” The Guatemalan peasants in shackles looked at each other, perplexed. (Camayd-­ Freixas 2008b, 14)

Camayd-­Freixas realized he was an instrument of the criminal process that turned the undocumented immigrants into criminals as part of the war on terror. The scheme, bogus charges and all, had all of us, down to the very judges, fall in line behind the shackled penguin march. . . . Thus, by painting the war on immigration as inseparable from the war on terror, the same expediency would supposedly apply to both. (20)

Camayd-­Freixas saw ICE as a predatory, tyrannical agency out of control. I felt in this situation the federal court was co-­opted and manipulated into a situation . . . by immigration enforcement. They are doing their own brand of immigration reform without Congress’s approval. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have been accused of this many times. (Camayd-­Freixas 2009)

This was mission creep, with DHS and ICE taking over the judiciary.

19. See note 18. See also “Number of Aliens Removed”; and “Table 39: Noncitizens Removed or Returned” (cited in the same note).

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I suddenly had the distinct impression that all the court’s actors, judges, lawyers, and interpreters were puppets in a marionette theater, with ICE pulling the strings from behind the curtain. (Camayd-­Freixas 2013)

What offended Camayd-­Freixas was how ICE set up the steps of the criminal justice process for an almost predetermined result. He saw this as a contamination or corruption of due process. In macro terms, this was an example of racialized statecraft: casting undocumented workers in the role of criminal conspirators subject to a deportation regime (De Genova 2010).

CONCLUSION In Postville, Iowa, and in the cases of Mehanna and Yousry, a circular logic was at work. Legal and social processes yielded a terrorist suspect, and the denomination of “terrorist” justified Homeland Security in suspending due process. This allowed prosecutors to introduce inflammatory material, offer unfair plea deals, or keep suspects in isolation or detention for days, weeks, months, and even years with only a fig leaf of a legal process. The racial categories associated with terrorism made transparent, coherent communication difficult. Put differently, when the legal actors were cast into the role of criminal or terrorist, they were cast into an otherness without a theory or method of communication, or a theory or method of translation. Undocumented workers were left to plead guilty to charges they did not understand, and Arab American defendants were constructed as cutout jihadists. This doomed them. Court interpreter Camayd-­Freixas showed the collusion of several state actors that rendered—­and overdetermined—­hapless undocumented workers as criminal aliens involved in identity theft. Thus, the apparent translation activity masked a deeper nontranslation across asymmetries of power. Not translating a word or concept such as “jihad” was part of the strategy of power. On the other hand, in each case the courts did take up translated texts as evidence of criminal culpability in the war on terror. In the ancien régime, as Michel Foucault (1975) famously depicted it, sovereign weakness rather than strength made it necessary for the

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sovereign to visit overwhelming violence upon the body of the accused in the form of public torture and execution. This was a way of terrorizing a community or population into compliance and submission. Here, through the terrorist assemblage, we have a contemporary throwback to that awful time: the full power of the state is visited on the body of the accused in a very public way, in a way calculated to strike dread and anxiety into a larger racially subaltern community. Translators and interpreters of all stripes have long complained of being rendered invisible. But here, paradoxically, the state marginalized subaltern knowledge and knowledge production by making these translators and interpreters more prominent than they otherwise would be. This was visibility of altogether the wrong sort. Mehanna, Yousry, and Camayd-­Freixas were thrust into a notoriety as unwelcome as it was unexpected.20 Epistemicide took place through making the translator visible. Mehanna and Yousry were held up as examples to be feared. In Camayd-­Freixas’s case, what was highlighted was that the United States had an epistemicidal project and it wanted to harness translators to work in obedience to it (by making the defendants’ utterances neatly fit the legal protocols of criminalization and deportation instead of representing their actual stories). These translators and interpreters were in a particularly fraught position because they were from subaltern groups or were translating for subaltern groups. Embedded within imperial wars, they were forced to maneuver in situations of institutionalized neocolonial oppression and racism, sometimes seemingly complicit in a system of racial subordination and state hostility, as Mae Ngai has put it in another context (2011, 14; see also Lugones 2003). Translators and interpreters do exercise agency. One should not, therefore, make the mistake of casting any of these translators as passive or innocent. The preceding argument gives many instances in which each acted to influence the flow of events. On the other hand, making a tendentious and intellectually flawed argument that Yousry controlled how things unfolded, while disavowing the war on terror and its disastrous consequences for Arab Americans and Latinxs, as Angelelli and Osman do, is ironically to damn the translator. These 20. I thank Sanjukta Banerjee and Rita Kothari for this observation. I also acknowledge discussion of this paragraph with Matthew Gleeson.

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translators exhibited agency by simultaneously colluding with and resisting hegemonic military and legal systems that control territories and strive for spatial domination. Ruth and Craig Gilmore argue that many of today’s conflicts perpetually define and redefine insiders and outsiders, “normalizing ways of seeing who is in or out” (Gilmore and Gilmore 2008, 143). The racial state signifies not simply the racist state—­the Jim Crow or Apartheid state—­but, rather, more generally the way the institutions comprising the state develop and act, legislatively, juridically, and administratively, through the establishment, regulation, and differentiation of racial formations that through assertion as well as ascription . . . themselves change over time. These days in the United States . . . the state’s management of racial categories is analogous to the management of highways or ports or telecommunication: racist ideological and material practices are infrastructure that needs to be updated, upgraded, and modernized periodically: this is what is meant by racialization. (144)

This account of the racial state helps explain the implicit racial coding that tied together language, translation, religion, and racialized bodies. Prosecutors and even judges framed jihad as inherently violent against the United States. Translating a generic text from Arabic implicated Mehanna himself. Translating is an embodied activity; translating is linked to the body of the translator. The embodied aspects of translation are even more obvious for interpreters. Yousry’s work interpreting in a terrorism trial implicated him in a very direct way in the activity for which he was convicted. For how else could a court-­appointed, antiauthoritarian, nonreligious Muslim be seen as conspiring with the same Sheik Abdel-­Rahman with whom he was in such deep ideological disagreement? State-­orchestrated epistemicide is effected through the construction of these ad hoc assemblages. “The study of these everyday practices,” Gupta tells us, and “of the circulation of representations that constitute particular states[,] might tell us not just what they mean, but how they mean, to whom, and under what circumstances” (2012, 70). Teasing out the elements of a criminal assemblage provides a robust account of how the criminal justice system brings together all these heterogeneous

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components to form a gestalt, a whole more than the sum of its parts. The courts “translated” (into legal terms) all these elements as material support for terrorism. Prosecutors worked with law enforcement and with the active or tacit participation of judges and interpreters to seal the fate of people racialized as people of color. The legal system, as a set of knowledge-­producing institutions, condemned the defendants and produced fear in their communities. Dominant legal narratives tend to tell and retell the story of the dominant class, what Freeman called the “perpetrator’s” perspective on discrimination, not the victim’s story, just as colonial historiography often colludes with colonial projects in inscribing history from the colonizer’s standpoint (Freeman 1996; Guha 1988a, 1988b). To be clear, the “perpetrator” here is the criminal justice system itself—­the judge, police, and prosecutors, and not the people convicted of any crimes. These are the insights of critical race theory and subaltern studies as well as other insurgent intellectual projects that seek to theorize from the other side of the colonial/racial divide and take up the standpoint and perspectives of the subaltern, racialized other. Translators and translation theorists are caught in this difficult binary between telling the story from the victor’s standpoint and telling it from the standpoint of history’s victims. The previous chapters have reviewed several techniques of using translation as a tool of epistemicide. We have also seen how Indigenous people, Latin American scholars, and subaltern translators have contested these processes. The next chapter explores how translation can follow an extractivist logic; I then turn to a reflection on decolonial and emancipatory paradigms for translation, translators, and translation theory.

CHAPTER 4 TRANSLATING PERFORMANCE IN LATIN AMERICA

IN RECENT YEARS, WESTERN PHARMACEUTICAL companies have rushed to patent Indigenous knowledge of botany, biomedicine, and techniques for processing and consuming native plants from around the world. This is sometimes referred to as bioprospecting or biopiracy (Hayden 2003; Shiva 2016; Aoki 1998; Chen 2005). Epistemicide in these cases involves “the capacity of one form of knowledge to convert another into a resource or raw material” (Santos 2005, xix). Western companies appropriate Indigenous knowledge in order to turn that knowledge into their own property for profit. This is a form of translation in the context of neocolonization and neoliberalism. Knowledge production is separated from knowledge producers, industrialized, commodified, and monetized, a process that brings with it an ethical, economic, material, and political charge (Code 1995; Fricker 2007).1 This kind of intellectual imperialism occurs not just in pharmaceuticals but also in the social sciences and humanities. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has been an incisive critic of piracy of this sort, in which academics from 1. Though Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees biopiracy as epistemicide, he does not necessarily see it as a form of translation in the context of neocolonization and neoliberalism. I am drawing that link and calling biopiracy a kind of translation.

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the United States or Western Europe appropriate ideas from Latin America and the Global South to package, copyright, and market as their own: “Just as in the global market for material goods, ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product” (2012, 104). Rivera Cusicanqui likens this process to Westerners accumulating exotic masks for their living room walls: “We have cooptation and mimesis, the selective incorporation of ideas and selective approval of those that better nourish a fashionable, depoliticized, and comfortable multiculturalism that allows one to accumulate exotic masks in one’s living room” (2012, 104). Intellectuals positioned in privileged institutional locations turn ideas and creative works into aesthetic objects for Western consumption and Western profit. In some of these cases, U.S.-­based academics simply pass off Latin American cultural production or the intellectual work of Latin American–­based intellectuals as their own to give impetus to their careers and to enhance their own prestige, often selectively appropriating in the process. Rivera Cusicanqui identifies the modernity/decoloniality group in particular as engaging in this kind of selective appropriation. In other cases, scholars from Europe or the United States take intellectual catchphrases or cultural artifacts out of context to market as academic commodities or as the cultural production of a fetishized other. Sometimes this takes the form of academics, designers, or artists in the First World taking the political style of a social movement and recycling that style in a way that is drained of its social weight or political critique. In other cases, academics or left intellectuals take political interventions by social movements and evoke them in a kind of vicarious or surrogate activism, in which scholars of privilege seek to connect themselves rhetorically to movements with which they have attenuated material or practical connections. Questions of intellectual appropriation from Latin America are nuanced, and specific cases are often far from black-­and-­white. Who owns an idea? Who owns a style of activism or a particular political tactic? An aesthetic? In some cases, U.S.-­based or European-­based intellectuals have been able to popularize concepts taken from Latin America. In those cases, the responsibility for giving undue credit to people situated in the Global North lies in part with an entire political economy that favors the West and the Global North, and not only with an author who cites a Latin American.

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Yet an ideology often runs in the background. By a kind of circular logic, these ploys have often been justified (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) by a conceit that only the West does “theory.” “Latin America produces great literature,” a colleague remarked to me, but he went on to say that only Western Europe and the United States produce great philosophy and original theory. The literary contributions and achievements of novelists Gabriel García Márquez, Clarice Lispector, and Juan Rulfo are widely acknowledged in the Western-­dominated academy. However, when it comes to theory and philosophy, so this commonplace runs, theory means Western or Eurocentric theory. Most academics in the Western academy are not as bold as my colleague in making this thesis explicit, and so the premise remains implicit. A casual glance at critical literature in English (and often in Spanish and Portuguese as well) reveals that Latin American cultural realities, practices, and discourses are often explained not in their own terms, or on their own terms, but rather analyzed in terms of Quine’s radical translation (Mannheim 2016), Foucault’s governmentality (Trigo 2013; Nuijten 2004), Deleuze’s rhizomes (Aldea 2013; Muehlmann 2012; Nail 2012), Agamben’s bare life (Svirsky and Bignall 2012), and so on. Latin America provides the grist, so to speak, for Europe’s theorizing. Within the worldview of Eurocentrism, Latin America (or South Asia, Arab countries, the entire continent of Africa, and so on) does not produce philosophy. In other words, philosophers, critics, and theorists from the non-­West are largely ignored in the European pantheon of analytic and continental philosophy. This tendency to turn to Europe and the United States for theory presupposes a hierarchy of knowledge in which theory is European or Eurocentric theory. The hierarchy is linked to, but distinct from, the global hegemony of English, and to a lesser extent linked to the more limited hegemonies of other European languages (such as French, German, and Spanish). Scholars from China, Portugal, or the Netherlands often opt to publish their work in English for wider dissemination and for the greater prestige often conferred upon English-­language publications (see Bennett 2007). The previous chapter explored the criminalization of translators and translation as a way to introduce fear into a subaltern community. Before that, I provided an inventory of some of the mechanisms of marginalizing Latin American theorists, focusing on José María Arguedas

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as one such case. In the first chapter, I argued that in the context of colonizing knowledge, making two entities commensurate can be a way to simultaneously impose and conceal a hierarchy as both entities are transformed. In this chapter, I explore a phenomenon that is similar and related to but also fundamentally different from these other operations of epistemicide. I provide an example of how creativity in the Global South is assimilated or filtered through the lens of Western disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) categories in a kind of imperial piracy. Yet Latin American intellectuals, performance artists, theorists, and theater-­ studies scholars are hardly passive in how they respond to this process, often changing or widening the terms of what counts as “theory” as they individually contest, affirm, or add nuance to the terms of what can be considered theory.

TRANSLATING “PERFORMANCE” Consider the translation of “performance” and “performance studies.” Several academics and intellectuals associated with performance studies have faced criticism for exhibiting a tendency to turn Latin American cultural production into fodder for Western academic thinking and theorizing. In some ways, there is nothing exceptional about performance studies in this respect. The criticism could apply to a varying extent to many disciplines across the humanities and sciences. To be sure, other Western disciplines have gone through their own version of disciplinary introspection or self-­interrogation, though often too little and too late, and only when forced to by Indigenous scholars, Black scholars, and other subaltern thinkers and critics of colonialism. Starting especially in the 1960s and 1970s, cultural anthropology (long characterized as the “handmaiden of colonialism”) has gone through a sustained process of critique from within and without. Philosophy has begun to go through its own version of rethinking the Eurocentric categories that ground the discipline. It has begun moving beyond the ham-­fisted and even racist assumptions implicit in formulating certain questions, such as, Is there Latin American philosophy? Is there African philosophy? and so on. Art history has also been going through a political and intellectual

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reckoning. Really, any discipline could have served as the chief example of this chapter. Performance studies has, to its credit, taken up the concern of academic appropriation, and it has become the subject of some lively debate. Because it is a young discipline, its process of canon formation is quite visible, which only throws questions of Eurocentrism into relief, occurring, as it does, amid larger considerations of neoliberal appropriation, cultural imperialism, and North–South relations in many domains and spheres of material, cultural, and intellectual life. “Performance studies,” at least in the context of the United States, implies not only a terminological question—­that is, the definition of the word performance—­but also a question of disciplinary foundations: “performance,” at the core of the nascent discipline of performance studies, has its journals, academic departments, and so on. From the beginning, performance studies has fashioned itself as, and made a virtue of being, open and omnivorous, countenancing a “broad spectrum” of performance-­related activity (Harding and Rosenthal 2011; Schechner 2010). As Richard Schechner, one of the founding theorists, put it: Performance—­as distinct from any of its subgenres like theatre, dance, music, and performance art—­is a broad spectrum of activities including at the very least the performing arts, rituals, healing, sports, popular entertainments, and performance in everyday life. (1988, 6)

For performance studies scholars, “performance” thus includes not only activities that are explicitly recognized as performance, such as theater or performance art. Performance studies also frames certain actions as performances. Diana Taylor makes this point adroitly: “Performance” also constitutes the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyze events as performance. Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural discourses, offers a way of knowing. The bracketing for these

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performances comes from outside, from the analytical lens that constitutes them as objects. (2003, 3)

Performance studies scholars thus see performance studies as implying a method or epistemology such that a wide range of activity can be interpreted as performance through analysis. As a result, performance studies (PS) has housed an incredible array of projects. For example, groundbreaking texts by Daphne Brooks (2006), Fred Moten (2003a), José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 2011), and others have shown how PS can provide scholars of color, including women and LGBTQ+ people, with helpful frameworks for theorizing a range of social practices. It has been a particularly reflexive discipline in many respects. For example, in one of its flagship publications, TDR, in 1994, performance artist and critic Coco Fusco provided an oft-­cited analysis of her own participation in the performance piece The Couple in the Cage, which she glosses as “a satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive Other” (1994, 143). That is to say, the discipline of performance studies has historically held open space for critical reflection on the relationship between colonialism, racist exhibition, cultural appropriation, and performance art. The response, as in many disciplines, has been uneven. Fusco’s erstwhile collaborator Guillermo Gómez-­Peña lends his sober, qualified support to performance studies against the charge of racism and imperialism while still taking the discipline to task for the way in which scholars and artists of color remain underpaid and underemployed: “I am still engaged in the endemic fight for inclusion, openness, and tolerance. In other territories I’d say it is already a lost fight. But in the performance field, it is still possible. Discussions like this one are allowed and even encouraged in spaces like TDR or the Hemispheric Institute” (Gómez-­Peña 2007, 20). Gómez-­Peña is frank, however, in acknowledging the ongoing material conditions of racist exclusion in performance studies. Throughout the years, I saw “the field” [of performance studies] evolve slowly from a mostly white, exclusive, and rarified “bohemian club” to one that welcomes racial, cultural, gender, and linguistic diversity—­I also saw [performance studies] evolve from overt racism in the pre-­multicultural era to unspoken racism in the much-­touted “post-­racist era.” (18)

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In this published interview, an “interviewer” (who may be Gómez-­Peña interviewing himself ) asks, “Is it still hard for a Chicano to get a job in academia or the art world?” Gómez-­Peña answers: A menial or secondary job? No. An important and well-­paid job? Yes. The operators with the best jobs are not always the most qualified but rather those who know how to work the system and therefore help perpetuate the system. A lot of extremely talented and politicized Latino artists and intellectuals are still underemployed, misemployed, or unemployed, including half of the members of my troupe. Breaks my heart. X : Isn’t this a serious form of racism? GÓMEZ-­P EÑA : It certainly is. . . . My Chicano colleagues are working twice as hard for half the money—­and that is when they are working at all. My colleagues in other countries can’t believe that Gómez-­Peña’s phone line and electricity gets shut off every now and then. And that my wife and I drive around in an ’88 Toyota. But I don’t complain since I may be one of a handful of US-­based Latino performance artists who can actually survive from my work. (20)

Since he is one of the most recognizable and accomplished contemporary performance artists, it is terrible to think that Gómez-­Peña still has hardly enough money to get by. His appraisal of systemic exclusion is grim, even as he thinks that performance studies has done more to surmount these challenges than other disciplines. Other performance artists and scholars worry that the discipline tends to act as an English-­language, monocultural, monolingual juggernaut, rolling over other languages and cultures, to the impoverishment of the discipline (Delgado 2015; Balme 2015; Graham-­Jones 2015). These critically minded performance studies scholars challenge the broad-­spectrum approach to performance as foreclosing certain kinds of reflections on theorizing itself (Rae 2011; Reinelt 2007; and see below). This chapter examines the imperialist potential of performance studies. In order to think this through, this chapter takes this up as a question of translation. How are disciplines “translated” across the North–South divide? Whether “performance” (the concept, the word, and also the discipline) can be translated into Latin America is the theme of the introduction to

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the influential book The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), by Diana Taylor, who has served as chair of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Taylor is one of several prominent scholars who argue against or minimize the potential for cultural and linguistic imperialism—­Richard Schechner and William Huizhu Sun do as well (see Schechner 2007; Sun 2007; Rae 2011; and see below). Since Taylor addresses this question of translation so clearly and powerfully as a question of disciplinary scope and methodology, since she addresses the possibility of cultural and linguistic imperialism, and since her otherwise excellent work has been so influential, her argument serves as a useful case study of this wider trend. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor makes an argument for why performance studies and the concept of performance cannot and should not be translated into Spanish. For her, the English term should be adopted throughout the Americas. To come to this conclusion, Taylor reviews many related concepts and possible translations into Latin American Spanish (“where the term finds no satisfactory equivalent”): teatralidad, espectáculo, acción, representación. She opts against all these possibilities. Taylor also entertains translating the term using Indigenous concepts, including olin and areito (Taylor 2003, 14). She asserts that using Indigenous words like olin and areito, which signal “a profoundly different worldview[,] would only be an act of wishful thinking, an attempt to forget our shared history of power relations and cultural domination, a history that would not disappear even if we changed our language.” By contrast, “the term ‘performance’ is not weighed down with centuries of evangelical work or normalizing activity” (15). A couple points should be made in relation to her not finding a useful Spanish, Portuguese, or Indigenous term. First, her translation project is miscast: she is fishing for a word-­for-­word equivalent to performance—­ that is, a single word that does exactly the same work, has the same semantic range, and has the same history (or, in her mind, lack of history). Unsurprisingly, she does not find that; that is because translation usually does not work by finding word-­for-­word equivalents in this strict sense, since a word in one language rarely has the same denotative and connotative range as a word in another. Second, and this seems worth emphasizing, Europeans and Euro-­Americans have a long history of

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finding colonized languages “lacking”—­colonizers from the fifteenth century on thought colonized languages were “missing” key concepts and sounds. Seeing nondominant languages in terms of deficit is aligned with this colonial history and this colonial linguistics. Let us look a little more closely at what she says about Indigenous words being overlain with colonial history. One of her reasons for not translating is that using Indigenous concepts to translate performance would be “wishful thinking” and would entangle the enterprise of analysis with the history of cultural domination. Still, she acknowledges that she is writing from the United States and using English. Is English somehow free of its own colonial history, especially in Latin America? To think so would be historical amnesia and betray guileless optimism. Taking “performance” out of the legacies of U.S. imperialism, in other words, evacuates history, and in particular a history of social relations of domination. In focusing on Latin America and reflecting on translation, Taylor does engage in a self-­reflective critique of her use of Anglo-­American terms to describe culture in the Americas. She seems to acknowledge the possibility of appropriation and intellectual piracy as I describe it above when she reviews previous theater criticism that seems to presuppose that “the non-­Western is the raw material to be reworked and made ‘original’ in the West” (Taylor 2003, 9). Ultimately, however, she does not seem to consider how a Eurocentric conceptual framework, backed by the institutional might of a Western university, has disciplined knowledge and research, and treated Latin America and other parts of the Global South as objects or raw material for research, as is the case with performance studies. When it comes to English, she loses her eye for the history of power relations and argues that the English term has a polysemic quality that makes it resonate throughout the Americas: Despite charges that performance is an Anglo word and that there is no way of making it sound comfortable in either Spanish or Portuguese, scholars and practitioners are beginning to appreciate its multivocal and strategic qualities. The word may be foreign and untranslatable, but the debates, decrees, and strategies arising from the many traditions of embodied practices and corporeal knowledge are deeply rooted and embattled in the Americas. (47)

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Taylor presents an interesting dilemma because elsewhere she focuses on the history of European colonization. Indeed, part of what she does in her body of work is show how, in the name of Catholicism, the Spaniards tried to suppress Indigenous (Mexica and others) activities that she frames as performance. She also shows how European conventions of theater were used as an instrument of domination: “With the Conquest, ‘theater’—­with an emphasis on the self-­consciously mimetic and representational—­became an instrument of colonization and evangelization” (Taylor and Townsend 2008, 5). Moreover, elsewhere she does take seriously a range of theorizing by Latin Americans; she has discussed Ángel Rama’s and Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturación or transculturation, for example (Taylor 2003, 93–­94, 104–­5; Taylor 1991a; Taylor 1991b; Rama [1982] 2012). Taylor has also acknowledged that “non–­ English speaking countries translate works written in English, but mostly not the other way around. So while excellent performance studies scholarship may be produced in Brazil, Korea, or Mexico, it will too rarely be available in English” (2007, 21). Yet Taylor ultimately subordinates all different forms of embodied Latin American creative practice to a higher-­order “performance” (in English). Taylor concludes where she started: a vindication of the utility of the term. She is careful to qualify her argument: “If we are not careful, the concept’s very flexibility and amplitude can lead us to overlook important differences among practices that fall under its wide umbrella, conflating terms as distinct as olin, a Nahuatl term meaning movement but also the motor behind everything that happens in life, and areito, a kind of song-­dance that derives from the Arawak word aririn” (Taylor and Townsend 2008, 2). Nevertheless, this question of “performance” providing a “wide umbrella” is part of the conceptual problem. The kinds of “performance” she seeks to capture or group together are rendered performances by grouping them. The argument is circular or tautological. To clarify, let us return to the distinction she draws between something that is performance and something that is analyzed as performance, what she also refers to as an ontological versus epistemological distinction. Some activity is clearly framed as a performance, especially in English—­who would fail to understand what is meant by the expression “A fine performance!” after a night at the theater? But now think of a funeral march in Mexico or a syncretic Catholic walking-­on-­the-­coals

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ceremony in the Argentine Andes in which the believer demonstrates her faith. Think of someone entering a trance or channeling their ancestors. This may be time marked off by the participants from normal everyday time and activity—­as ritual time, for example. But what categories do the participants use to describe the activity? Would they be offended if they were told they were “performing”? Could not translating all those varied activities as performance be a conceptual overreach at odds with what the practitioners would like or even recognize? Framing other activities as performance can lead to troubling paradoxes and even ethical questions. Where would it, or could it, or should it end? Jews praying in synagogue? A paramilitary massacre? I remember an old woman who punched and kicked my friend and tried to take away his camera on the streets of Shanghai when he tried to photograph her giving someone a haircut in the street. What is the performance there? Her giving a haircut to someone? Yet she obviously objected to being put on a stage. Or perhaps my friend getting his comeuppance was the performance? These examples may seem heavy-­handed. But one might justifiably worry that in the enthusiasm to group diverse things under the umbrella of “performance,” the criterion becomes too wide. Is everything a performance? Then what is the analytical value? Fred Moten perceived this as a possible problem as early as 2003: The terms “performance” and “performativity”—­in the promiscuity of their applications and in the very indefinition of their own specific concept of an object of study—­often threaten to assert themselves as the ground of every possible area of study. (Moten 2003b, 109)

The range of where performance could be applied is ultimately a question of social relations and the distribution of cognitive authority. Who has the power to name? Performance studies stakes its claim throughout the Americas through social power. Mapping the authority of performance studies in Latin America may be a way of mapping sociopolitical power structures (cf. Code 1995, 62). Rivera Cusicanqui warns that the appropriation and translation of cultural production from the Global South can also be profoundly depoliticizing. Analyzing a street protest, for example, as a “performance” runs this risk of depoliticizing it.

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CONTESTING “PERFORMANCE” Let’s move the question about the translatability of the word performance into a space where certain terms win out not because of their semantic range, unique lexical brilliance, or explanatory value, but more often because they are in the language of those with social power. For Taylor, even the apparent drawbacks of the word—­that Latin Americans who don’t speak English won’t understand it—­turn into an advantage. The problem of untranslatability, as I see it, is actually a positive one, a necessary stumbling block that reminds us that we—­in our various disciplines, languages, or geographic locations throughout the Americas—­do not simply or unproblematically understand one another. I agree that we start with the premise that we do not understand each other. This stumbling block stymies not only Spanish and Portuguese speakers faced with a foreign word but also English speakers who thought they knew what performance meant. (Taylor 2003, 15)

Are Spanish or Portuguese speakers “stymied” by the presence of an imperial category? If they are, this is not necessarily equivalent to, or even commensurate with, the hoped-­for defamiliarization native English speakers would experience. If the unfamiliarity—­or, in the case of English speakers, the defamiliarization—­is generative, why does it have to be in Western terms or produced by a Western term? Why must the analytic lens remain an Anglo-­American or European one, where Latin American culture is the raw material for the Northern critic? When the linguistic categories are Western, then other possible analytics or theoretical models that emerge from outside the West are discarded. The linguistic hierarchy imposed by coloniality and imperialism means that the theoretical categories themselves remain Western. Latin American and Indigenous cultural and intellectual production is subject to those Eurocentric categories or rubrics. In What Is Performance Studies? / ¿Qué son los estudios de performance? / O que são os estudos da performance?  (2015), an online resource, Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel interview a number of performance studies scholars, as well as allied dramaturgs, intellectuals, and theater directors from the United States and Latin America who are

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in dialogue with performance studies. These interviews are fascinating in part because the interviewers ask explicitly whether and to what extent the interviewees use “performance” and performance studies as an analytical framework. The interviewees respond in a number of ways, often nuancing the question or reframing the premise. Explicitly at stake in all of the conversations and interviews is whether performance studies is a discipline, whether it has wide purchase in distinct Latin American countries and in Black studies, and how “performance studies” stands vis-­à-­ vis other terms and concepts. One can see the contours of the (inter)discipline hammered out in real time as these theorists and practitioners debate the usefulness of different terms. Many of these intellectuals see performance studies as a lens or as a constellation of interdisciplinary methodologies that advance their own intellectual projects. In her interview with Diana Taylor, Daphne Brooks, author of the extraordinary Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–­1910  (2006), comments that performance studies allowed me to think about amplifying my analytical exploration of Black cultural production. . . . [I] found that the ways in which I wanted to think about everyone from Phillis Wheatley to Frederick Douglass to Holly Hopkins, as being alive, was by putting those discursive moments in relation to embodied cultural sites of enactment that various Black figures were negotiating and improvising in the antebellum and post-­ bellum era. So, to me, performance studies is a discipline that enables you to radically contextualize how we think about the production of culture and, as a Black feminist scholar, it enables me to think about the body and the corporeal as being central to our understanding of cultural production. So, what is performance studies? It’s thinking about embodiment as somehow enriching our understanding of text. (Brooks 2015)

Similarly, the late José Muñoz, author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), among other influential works, suggests how performance studies offered a set of interdisciplinary tools to document and analyze “anti-­normative performances by people of color, by gays and lesbians or other sexual minoritarians, and looked specifically at the work their performances did in the world”

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(Muñoz 2015). Muñoz describes how performance studies can also be used to write about religious practices: I’ve been going to churches in the Lower East Side and in Miami and observing different performances of religiosity—­people’s bodies, people’s speech acts, the kind of religious transport that individuals and groups experience. And I’ve been trying to think about that in relationship to their particular position on a map that is attuned to globalization as a process and to think about the ways in which different new immigrants or new exile communities are disenfranchised in US late capitalism and don’t have an anchor to a sense of community or place. And they find that again through religiosity or spectacles of religiosity, like they do in these churches. (Muñoz 2015)

Across Latin America, scholars, artists, and intellectuals have worked with, and sometimes struggled against, the vocabulary of performance as designating a discipline. Even cultural workers and academics who are devoted to propagating performance studies acknowledge widespread resistance to the terminology of performance in Latin America. Brazilian scholar Zeca Ligiéro, author of Teatro das origens—­Estudos das performances Afro-­ameríndias (2019) and many other books, takes Afro-­Brazilian and Indigenous traditions to be “performances” in a way that others find strange and shocking: Quando eu uso a palavra “performance” ou “prática performativa” para me referir à tradição ameríndia ou à tradição afro, as pessoas estranham, ainda há um estranhamento. Isso eu estou usando já há doze anos, esse conceito de performance afro-­brasileira, afro-­ameríndia. Ainda há uma resistência muito grande. Mas, hoje em dia, já vejo isso aparecendo. . . . Então isso já está mais na ordem do dia, a palavra “performance” já sendo aplicada não só à arte como também às tradições religiosas, às tradições festivas. Então eu acho que já há uma mudança, embora haja muita resistência ainda. (Ligiéro 2015a) (When I use the word “performance” or “performative practice” [prática performativa] to refer to the Amerindian tradition or to the Afro tradition, people think it’s strange, there’s still a shock. And I have been

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using this for 12 years, this concept of Afro-­Brazilian performance, Afro-­ Amerindian. There is still a strong resistance. But I do see it showing up today. . . . So it is becoming more common; the word “performance” is already being applied not only to the arts, but also to religious traditions, to festive traditions. So I think there is a shift already, although there is still a lot of resistance.) (Ligiéro 2015b)2

In this case, performance studies scholars sort through and take up, not only creative production but also spiritual practices and festivals through an exogenous academic category, redescribing these activities through the disciplinary lens of performance. Some of Ligiéro’s colleagues have hesitated to adopt “performance.” Mas eu acredito que ainda há resistência, sim, acho que as pessoas ainda falam: “Performance é uma palavra que não existe no português”. Até o dicionário do computador acusa “performance” e quer transformar “performance” em “representação”, em “apresentação”, eu tenho que toda hora ficar dizendo: Não, eu quero é performance mesmo. Acho que demora para as coisas serem absorvidas, serem transformadas. (Ligiéro 2015a) (But I do believe there is still resistance. I think people still say: “Performance is not a Portuguese word.” Even the computer dictionary marks “performance” and wants to change “performance” into “representation,” into “presentation.” I have to say all the time: No, I actually want “performance.” I think it takes time for things to sink in, to be transformed.) (Ligiéro 2015b)

Ligiéro attributes the resistance to orthodoxy and to cultural conservatism, not to resistance to linguistic imperialism. He does not see importing performance studies as grafting a foreign way of thinking, even as he acknowledges that performance studies represents a way of thinking.

2. Throughout this chapter, the English translations of the interviews in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese were included in Taylor and Steuernagel’s original publication and credited to the following team: Khalil Chaar, Pablo A. Costa, Margot Olavarría, Tissiana Oliva, Sebastian Reyes, Marcos Steuernagel, and Miguel Winograd.

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E há uma resistência principalmente no mundo acadêmico, vamos dizer, as pessoas mais tradicionais, mais ortodoxas, elas não gostam muito, acham que é uma coisa americanizada, que é uma coisa, enfim. . . . Ainda há, sim. Mas a batalha é essa. . . . Porque assim, para mim, os estudos da performance, mais do que um rótulo, são um processo de conhecimento. (Ligiéro 2015a) (And there is resistance especially from the academic world, say, from people who are more traditional, more orthodox; they don’t like it very much, they think it is too Americanized, that is, you know. . . . That still exists. But that’s the struggle. . . . Because, for me, performance studies, more than a label, is a way of knowing.) (Ligiéro 2015b)

For Ligiéro, performance studies offers an epistemology. Other thinkers treat the terms “performance” and “performance studies” with ambivalence. Diana Taylor interviewed Antonio Prieto in Mexico in 2011. Prieto is the editor of Corporalidades escénicas: Representaciones del cuerpo en el teatro, la danza y el performance (2016). He conveys how guarded his colleagues in Mexico are with the foreign term and its semantic ambiguity. DIANA TAYLOR: ¿Me podrías decir un poco cómo se entiende performance y estudios de performance en México? ¿Significa la misma cosa, o hay una diferencia muy clara entre las dos? ANTONIO PRIETO : Bueno, como recordarás cuando tuvimos el Encuentro del Instituto Hemisférico en Monterrey en el 2001, hubo mucha confusión, justamente porque la gente no sabía distinguir entre “performance”—­ que entiende la gente por lo general como el arte de performance, o el arte de acción—­y “performance studies”, que es un paradigma teórico reciente, relativamente reciente, llegado a México. . . . Entonces, de haber sido una cosa de resistencia, de sospecha, de no querer aceptar los estudios de performance porque amenaza a estudios del teatro, creo que empiezan a entender que es algo que puede enriquecer a los estudios teatrales también. (Prieto 2015a) DIANA TAYLOR : Can you tell me a little bit about how you understand performance and performance studies in Mexico, if they mean the same thing, or if there is a clear difference between the two?

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ANTONIO PRIETO : Well, as you remember from when we had the  Hemispheric Institute Encuentro in Monterrey in 2001, there was a lot of confusion exactly because people didn’t know how to distinguish between “performance,” which is generally understood by people as performance art, or as art action, and “performance studies,” which is a relatively new theoretical paradigm, recently arrived in Mexico. . . . It has gone from being a suspicious thing and not wanting to understand performance studies because they threaten theater studies, to beginning to understand that it’s something that can make theater studies richer.) (Prieto 2015b)

Other scholars go further in resisting “performance.” For example, poet Leda Maria Martins, professor at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, thinks that “corporalidade” (corporality) is more apropos. DIANA TAYLOR [in Spanish in the original]: Tu trabajo sobre oralidades, u otro tipo de trabajo que tiene que ver con el cuerpo, con todo el conocimiento encarnado. Todo eso para mí es performance, ¿no? Entonces hay muchos estudios de esos que no caen, digamos, oficialmente, estrictamente, dentro de un campo ya conocido. Pero yo creo que hay mucha gente que hace un trabajo muy, muy importante, que yo creo, en el sentido más amplio, es estudios de performance. LEDA MARIA MARTINS [in Portuguese in the original]: Eu acho que o significante, talvez, de maior valia, no Brasil, de maior circulação, talvez não seja performance, mas corporalidade. Então, eu acho que corporalidade é um significante com mais trânsito no Brasil. Mas eu diria que, na última década, performance tem despertado como área de conhecimento, como episteme. Mesmo porque eu distingo da prática, que nós chamamos a prática da performance, e aí você tem uma variedade muito grande de artistas que se dizem performer, ou revelam curiosidade sobre. (Martins 2015a) DIANA TAYLOR : Your work on oralities, or other work related to the body, with all the embodied knowledge. All this is performance to me, right? . . . I believe there are many people who do extremely important work that is, I believe in the broader sense, performance studies. LEDA MARIA MARTINS : I think the signifier that is, let’s say, most useful in Brazil, that is used the most, is maybe not performance, but corporality

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[corporalidade]. . . . But I would say that, within the last decade, performance has grown as a field of knowledge, as an episteme. Especially because I distinguish this from practice, what we call the practice of performance, and there you have a wide range of artists who call themselves performers, or who are curious about it.) (Martins 2015b)

Similarly, Brazilian stage director Beth Lopes identifies performance studies with the United States, and so she draws a complicated picture, arguing that performance studies brings to the surface tendencies and resources that are already present in and autochthonous to Brazil. MARCOS STEUERNAGEL: A primeira coisa que eu queria te perguntar é se você acha que os estudos da performance se constituem como um campo no Brasil, se existe a ideia disso como uma disciplina. ELISABETH LOPES: Eu acho que os estudos da performance vêm se constituindo mais recentemente como um campo de estudo, como um campo de saber. Eu acho que, na nossa tradição, na universidade, a performance esteve sempre mais ligada à performance arte. O campo de estudos da performance vem sendo trazido justamente pelas influências do Richard Schechner, da Diana Taylor. . . . MARCOS : . . . E por conta dessas influências que você citou, você acha que os estudos da performance são percebidos como um campo estadunidense? Ou existe uma produção brasileira também nesse sentido? Como é a percepção desse campo de pesquisa? BETH : Eu acho que é um campo de pesquisa estadunidense que encontra uma ressonância no território nacional. Eu vejo, por exemplo, em Santa Catarina, que tem uma universidade bastante forte, eu vejo que existe um amplo trabalho voltado para o teatro de rua, o teatro na cidade, a percepção dos corpos na cidade. Então eu vejo que isso já existia antes de se conhecer essa abordagem estadunidense. Então eu acredito que o que emerge, o que vem ao encontro dessa perspectiva conceitual, são fontes que já existem. (Lopes 2015a) MARCOS STEUERNAGEL : The first thing I want to ask is if you think performance studies is constituted as a field in Brazil, if it is thought of as a discipline. BETH LOPES : I believe performance studies has begun recently to be defined as a field of study, as a field of knowledge. I believe, in our tradition, within

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the university, performance has always been much more connected to performance art. The field of performance studies is being brought precisely by the influence of Richard Schechner, of Diana Taylor. . . . MARCOS : . . . And, because of these influences you mentioned, do you think performance studies is perceived as a US-­American field? Or is there also a Brazilian production? How is this field of research perceived? BETH : I think it is a US-­American field of research that finds resonance in the national context [of Brazil]. I see, for example, in Santa Catarina . . . there is extensive work focused on street theater, theater in the city, the perception of bodies in the city. So, as I see it, this already existed before knowing about this US-­American approach. So, I believe what comes to the surface, what responds to this conceptual perspective, are sources that already exist.) (Lopes 2015b)

Lopes thinks that certain long-­standing cultural practices in Brazil may have coalesced under the heading of performance studies. To the extent that performance studies has found an anchor in Brazil, she attributes it to the influence of U.S.-­based intellectuals. MARCOS STEUERNAGEL : E em termos dessa produção acadêmica, quais são as referências que estão sendo usadas? Quer dizer, existem traduções? É um material que está em inglês, ou que está em outras línguas? Ou algumas referências locais? Quais são as referências que você acha que formariam um campo de estudos da performance no Brasil? ELISABETH LOPES : . . . a maior referência no momento é o Richard Schechner, que eu acho que chega tardiamente no Brasil. Acho que a Diana Taylor é uma outra referência, que também vejo que chega tardiamente. Nós estamos preparando um livro com tradução para o português de textos do Richard Schechner e recentemente houve uma tradução de um livro da Diana Taylor. (Lopes 2015a) MARCOS STEUERNAGEL : And, regarding the academic production, what are the references being used? I mean, are there translations? Is the material in English or in other languages? Or are there some local references? Which are the references you see as constituting the field of performance studies in Brazil? BETH LOPES : . . . The strongest reference right now is Richard Schechner, who I think arrives late in Brazil. I think Diana Taylor is another refer-

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ence, who I also think arrives late. We are preparing a book with translations into Portuguese of texts by Richard Schechner, and recently there was a translation of a book by Diana Taylor.) (Lopes 2015b)

Zeca Ligiéro would agree that one reason for the outsize influence of the United States is that texts by performance studies scholars based in the United States are what has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese or otherwise made available, even if in English. DIANA TAYLOR [in English in the original]: And do you have difficulty finding materials for teaching, or are there enough things being published now, or the work that you all are publishing? ZECA LIGIÉRO : Desculpe. . . . Ainda tem pouco material. Eu acho que tem muito material em inglês com que a gente trabalha, né? (Ligiéro 2015a) ZECA LIGIÉRO : Sorry. . . . There is still not much material. I think there is a lot of material in English that we work with, right?) (Ligiéro 2015b)

Despite its attempts to subsume the creative power of Latin America, performance studies is thus always subject to the complexities of cultural negotiation. What Brian Baer writes of translation, especially of queer terminology, is true of the transposition of “performance” in Latin America. Baer shows how translating queer as qvir (his transliteration of Cyrillic) in contemporary Russian journals, despite appearing to be simply the importation of Western identity politics, cannot be reduced to imperialism of English-­language gender identities. Instead, Baer argues, in these cases English-­language terms are reworked and given new meanings in a new context, and this process shows the agency and subjective activity of the receiving culture (Baer 2018, 41). Similarly, “performance” is not received passively in Latin America. Parenthetically, this hearkens back to a long tradition in Latin America of selectively appropriating culture from the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world in a way that fortifies Latin American creativity. This “anthropophagic” tradition consumes culture from the imperial centers. Through this lens, absorbing imperialist culture exemplifies not knuckling under to colonial domination but rather using this culture as a means to strengthen and inspire that which is autochthonous to Latin America. This posture with respect to the foreign has its clearest

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articulation, perhaps, in Oswald de Andrade’s modernist Manifesto antropófago (1928), which has been translated as “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1991). This manifesto influenced two brothers, well-­known mid-­ twentieth-­century poets, critics, and translators, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and their “anthropophagic” approach to translation (see, for example, Viera 1994, 2012; Veloso 1997; Campos 1981, 2007; Gentzler 2008). Haroldo de Campos argued that the (Brazilian) translator can be a “bad savage” who devours whites and is “capable of appropriation and of expropriation, of dehierarchization, of deconstruction. Any past which is an ‘other’ for us deserves to be negated. We could even say, it deserves to be eaten, devoured” (Campos 2007, 159–­60). But de Campos added an important proviso: the cannibal “devoured only the enemies he considered courageous, taking their marrow and protein to fortify and renew his own natural energies” (160). The de Campos brothers translated John Donne, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others. They influenced countless others throughout Latin America and elsewhere, including the Tropicália movement and its consciously “cannibalistic” tendency toward the Beatles, Carmen Miranda, and other aspects of high and low culture, camp and kitsch, in a way that is characteristically Brazilian (see Price [2017] for a deeper exploration of this theme in the work of Caetano Veloso). Turning back, then, to the ambivalent Latin American reception of “performance,” the discomfort is sometimes explicit. For example, Beth Lopes prefers “teatro” or “teatro performático” (theater or performative theater) to “performance studies” as a constitutive field in Brazil. MARCOS STEUERNAGEL: E pensando um pouco sobre o que seria a formação de um campo de estudos da performance no Brasil, quais você acha que seriam contribuições particulares, ou que tipo de produção de conhecimento que pode acontecer em termos de performance no Brasil que seria mais específico de um contexto brasileiro? Como você vê a produção, talvez, de um campo de estudos da performance brasileiro? ELISABETH LOPES: Eu acho que o próprio teatro é um campo muito forte. Eu acho que o teatro brasileiro é um teatro que mescla as características culturais do Brasil. Então, cada vez mais, eu acho que ele se volta para suas próprias origens, para a sua própria cultura, para os seus costumes, folclore. Então eu acho que o teatro está muito enfeixado sobre a sua própria cultura. E acho que também, em função dessa vertente

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mais original, vamos chamar assim, eu acho que o teatro se volta para questões sociais e políticas do seu próprio contexto com mais intensidade. Então, eu acho que o próprio teatro, que nós estamos chamando de “teatro performático”, ele vem rompendo, ou prolongando, intensificando as suas origens, as origens culturais, e se contextualizando, tendo como base os movimentos sociais e políticos. (Lopes 2015a) MARCOS STEUERNAGEL : And thinking about what the constitution of a field of performance studies in Brazil would look like, what do you feel would be particular contributions, or what kind of knowledge can be produced in terms of performance in Brazil that would be specific to a Brazilian context? How would you see the production, perhaps, of a Brazilian field of performance studies? BETH LOPES : I think theater itself is a very strong field. I think Brazilian theater is a theater that mixes Brazil’s cultural features. So I believe it returns, more and more, to its own origins, to its own culture, to its customs, folklore. So, I think theater is very enmeshed with its own culture. And I also believe that, due to this stream that is more, let’s say, original, I think theater turns itself to social and political issues of its own context with more intensity. So, I believe theater itself, what we are calling “performatic theater” [teatro performático], has been breaking with or extending, intensifying, its origins, its cultural origins, and contextualizing itself, grounded on social and political movements.) (Lopes 2015b)

Other critics eschew the terminology of performance studies altogether. When asked, Diamela Eltit, a well-­known Chilean intellectual and dramaturg, sidesteps addressing “performance” directly (Eltit 2015). Instead, Eltit uses an interview with Diana Taylor to discuss the student movement, and the successes and failures of the concertación, the progressive coalition that arose in the wake of the defeat of the military regime under Pinochet. Through these interviews that Taylor and Steuernagel conduct, a range of scholars, theater directors, producers, and critics offer subtle accounts of how performance studies has been regarded in Latin America. Several suggest that performance studies is inevitably viewed by many Latin Americans as a U.S. import. The provenance itself is one reason for the suspicion it may engender. Ligiéro sees skepticism from cultural

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conservatives; Prieto sees some Latin Americans as straightforwardly puzzled by the terminology and its disciplinary ambitions. Lopes and others see the terminology of theater studies as more rooted in Brazil and thus a better fit, and are wary, while not ruling out that translated texts by Schechner, Taylor, or others might contribute to thinking in Brazil.

CRITIQUES FROM WITHIN Critical reflection on imperialism in performance studies and other academic disciplines often invokes the hegemony of English and of Anglophone theorizing. Whether the prevalence of Anglophone theory betrays its dominion in performance studies has been the subject of some mild contention among academics within the field (see, e.g., Rae 2011; Mc­Kenzie 2010; Delgado 2015; Moten 2003b). Performance studies scholars Jon McKenzie and Janelle Reinelt have both commented on the pervasive and persistent Anglocentrism in scholarship, journals, symposia, and international meetings. Both McKenzie and Reinelt are careful to argue that they do not blame the discipline of performance studies per se; they each acknowledge, as do their critics, that performance studies as an academic discipline (or transdisciplinary endeavor) exists alongside other imperial structures in Anglophone countries. McKenzie observes, for example, that “the linguistic imperialism of Anglophone PS [performance studies] is tied to the history of British and American imperialisms” (2006, 7). Other academic disciplines display similar tendencies; academic conferences, for example, sometimes make halfhearted attempts to be inclusive and pluralistic but often end up reverting to an unreflective English as the language of scholarship. These conferences reflect a “thin cultural cosmopolitanism, which lacks due consideration of either the hierarchies of power subtending cross-­cultural engagement or the economic and material conditions that enable it” (Gilbert and Lo 2009, 9). McKenzie puts forward a nuanced set of concerns to uncover how cultural imperialism works; he studiously avoids any ad hominem charges. Imperialism is structural. Though I strongly believe that not one performance studies scholar anywhere actively espouses any sort of imperialism—­just the opposite: I

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believe performance studies at large is vehemently anti-­imperialist—­I nonetheless recognize an imperialist effect that affects performance researchers and practitioners. (McKenzie 2006, 7)

McKenzie puts this as a translation question. Several questions arise: How is this “performance” translated? When and why is it sometimes left untranslated? How do “performance” and its translations resonate with other terms and usages? (7)

He concludes by making a connection between language and theory: “the dominance of English informs and deforms the very concept of ‘performance’ and, by extension, the very objects studied ‘as’ performance” (7). Janelle Reinelt responds more directly to what Richard Schechner (2010) has called the “broad spectrum” approach in performance studies. What is broad spectrum to Schechner is a problematic overreach for Reinelt: “Part of the problem is the inclusive, some say rapacious, grasp of performance studies” (2007, 11). She cites Schechner’s laying out of performance studies as a gigantic omnivore: “Because performance studies is so broad-­ranging and open to new possibilities, no one can actually grasp its totality or press all its vastness and variety into a single book” (11). Reinelt concludes, “This claim has made scholars apprehensive about the all-­inclusive nature of performance, that anything and everything can be performance studies” (11). Maria Delgado seems to share Reinelt’s concern with English hegemony and appetite: Performance studies . . . is still highly inflected through Anglo-­American parameters and critical discourses. Performance studies has certainly opened up academic attention to a range of cultural phenomena and manifestations but it has also permitted and indeed endorsed particular colonialist assumptions around the availability and “ownership” of the performance event. . . . In our supposedly global marketplace, in a voracious search for the new, how far are we, as performance scholars, cultural tourists searching to expand our own horizons and those of our discipline through contact with “otherness.” (2015, 104)

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Though acknowledging changes in the discipline, Delgado comments, “There’s a ways to go.” In facilitating mechanisms that allow for the dissemination of research beyond the mainstream Anglo-­American paradigm, perhaps we can attempt to create broader histories of performance that interrogate rather than accept the political hegemony of English and the implications of this for our understanding of the global village. (107)

Reinelt recommends that Western scholars engage in a studied forbearance, “an efficacious gesture of humility.” In what could be a rebuke of Diana Taylor’s aspiration toward a hemispheric reach for performance studies, she suggests, “It may be time to back away from further attempts to establish its rhetoric as a globalized scholarly vocabulary” (Reinelt 2007, 14). In a thoughtful reflection from Singapore, Paul Rae similarly takes issue with the “broad” umbrella which scholars such as Richard Schechner or Diana Taylor claim for performance studies. The broad-­spectrum approach doesn’t take sufficiently seriously the conditions for its own disciplinary becoming vis-­à-­vis other practices. To describe as “broad” a research paradigm that fails to account for the distinctive ways in which such developments will impact on the function, meaning and effects of “performance” is a misnomer. Beyond designating or studying diverse practices “as” performance, what is increasingly important in a world of pluralizing, interconnected modernities is understanding the role performance plays in materializing and mediating the relationships between such practices. (Rae 2011, 73)

Rae takes a metatheoretical look at the actual part performance studies plays in connecting cultures and traditions; in this way, he sees performance studies as mediating between cultures analogous to the way bilingual dictionaries served to commensurate different linguistic traditions in the first centuries of the Conquest (as I argued in chapter 1). Reinelt, McKenzie, Delgado, and Rae are careful not to issue indictments. Nevertheless, they probe the question of intellectual and linguistic imperialism honestly and forthrightly. They have been met with

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furious contempt (Schechner 2007), dismissal (Taylor 2003), and even charges of “Red Guard thinking” (Sun 2007).

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? In a forum titled “Is Performance Studies Imperialist?” Richard Schechner suggests the question contains an unintended irony: “To call performance studies imperialist is to disregard the discipline’s instrumentality in engaging and including performance practices, scholars, and theories from all over the world” (Schechner 2007, 8). Performance studies, Schechner seems to argue, has been particularly diligent in engaging scholars and performers around the globe on equal footing. “Do those who practice and theorize performance studies,” he asks rhetorically, “intend to impose (by force of academic privilege, if not armed might) a set of ‘alien’ or ‘outside’ values on everyone else?” (8). For Schechner, the answer is an emphatic “no!” Intentions aside, one might ask whether he is in the best position to know whether performance studies imposes itself on others. William Huizhu Sun distinguishes between critiquing a particular researcher or their practice as imperialist and tarring an entire discipline. In a short essay, “Guard Against ‘Red Guard Thinking’” (2007), Sun begins, “Labeling an academic discipline or research field ‘imperialist,’ or with some other pejorative political term, always reminds me of a kind of ‘Red Guard thinking’” (17). Sun sees the charge of imperialism to be an act of name-­calling—­an anti-­intellectual gesture—­and even an absolutist attempt to silence, rather than a description of a geopolitical relationship or a conclusion reached through analysis. He recognizes that there may be performance studies scholars who impose performance studies on non-­ Western cultures without considering those cultures’ histories. But having imperialist practitioners is true of any and every discipline. Sun continues: These scholars are just like imperialist physicists and engineers who in the past used their knowledge and skills to mine colonies for economic gains and political control. . . . Or some of today’s Western medical-­ biologists who use naive or desperately poor people in the third world as guinea pigs for experiments that cannot be done in the West. These

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practices are all imperialistic. But ought we to label biology, physics, and engineering themselves—­not just the exploiters within those disciplines—­as imperialistic? (17)

Sun seems to be open to criticism and critique of cultural or intellectual imperialism in specific cases, but he thinks that describing the entire enterprise of performance studies as imperialist is a category error. Using a similar but distinct logic, Diana Taylor thinks many of the critiques of academic imperialism conflate Anglophone researchers and their governments: “For some, apparently PS equals the US and the UK, and scholars become personally responsible for decisions made by national governments” (2007, 20). Taylor argues that there is nothing unusual in performance studies that is not also true of gender studies and critical race theory. The critique that the trans [of “transdisciplinary”] signals PS’s “rapacious” and imperialist border-­crossing nature would have to extend to all the trans-­disciplines. If race theory and gender studies and Marxist criticism are also deemed “imperialist” and “rapacious” then we have to wonder what to call Halliburton and Murdoch. (20)

Taylor is arguing that critiques of imperialist tendencies in academic theory are on a slippery slope. She seems to have in mind not only critics of performance studies, but also more generally critics from the Global South and across the West who have taken to task theorists of race, gender studies, and Marxism based in the United States and Europe when these theorists have participated in intellectual imperialism (see, e.g., Mohanty 1984, 2003; Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). Yet these critics of the West do crucial work in identifying certain academic practices as imperialist. They can do that and still draw distinctions in degree and kind between academic imperialism and the economic or material imperialism of the kind Halliburton and Rupert Murdoch represent. Taylor is surely right that other disciplines and tendencies in the U.S. academy have also colluded with academic imperialism, even if transnational corporations and the U.S. and UK governments are much worse offenders. Different academic disciplines have been differentially—­that is, more or less—­open to exploring their own imperialist tendencies.

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Taylor insists that performance studies is anti-­imperialist because the field is predicated on recognizing that embodied practice transmits cultural knowledge, memory, and identity, thus decentering Western writing practices, and also because performance studies scholars often locate themselves “as part of the scenario” (Taylor 2007, 23). It is not clear, finally, why looking at embodied practices is in and of itself anti-­ imperialist, or why those scholars who “locate themselves” let the discipline off the hook. There is not enough dialogue, Taylor has pointed out: “To expect other scholars to speak English only aggravates the issue. An invitation to have a dialogue, on ‘our’ terms, in ‘our’ language, hardly constitutes an openness to exchange” (2007, 21). She has done enormous work to try and address that lack of dialogue, including compiling the online book of interviews with Latin American intellectuals, theater people, and academics on which I drew extensively above. “The circulation of knowledge,” Taylor continues, “which like all else is deeply bound up with imperialist politics, usually goes one-­way. Academic and editorial practices often replicate dominant politics of exchange” (21). Taylor thus acknowledges what María Constanza Guzmán Martínez has called “vectors of exchange”: What is the directionality of the translated exchanges? How is translation praxis in and of itself a traducción epidérmica (i.e., a symptom of deeper mental, political, and symbolic workings)? How does translation perpetuate colonial intellectual and epistemic legacies? How does it subvert, resist, and decolonize the spaces inscribed by these legacies? What are the images of Latin America and the Caribbean that emerge from these forms of praxis? (Guzmán Martínez 2020, 17)

In the final analysis, however, Schechner, Taylor, and others maintain the necessity of performance studies as a Western category setting the terms.

CONCLUSION For some, performance studies provides something approaching a universal category or lens for analysis. Advocates for this position might

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see this as an inductive conclusion, the result of research: upon investigation, performance applies to all cultures, at least in Latin America. As a result, in the hands of its most ardent advocates, performance studies risks promoting a “generic critical lexicon,” as Emily Apter has put the point in a different context, “that presumes universal translatability or global applicability” (2008, 581). Such theoretical paradigms, “centered in Western literary practices and conventions, thus ‘forget’ that they are interculturally incommensurate” with other worlds (581). The interviews with Latin American intellectuals and scholars of color in the United States suggest that the universality of performance studies is also aspirational. Given the idiosyncrasies of human creativity, language and thinking are inevitably centrifugal and subversive and may contribute to undermining disciplinary and epistemic imperialism. Let us return, in conclusion, to Diana Taylor’s interview with Zeca Ligiéro, this time in its full sonic performance. Even as Ligiéro speaks glowingly of performance and performance studies in Brazil, his intralingual interpretation engenders subversion. In the digital edition (Ligiéro 2015a), one can play a video recording of the interview. Ligiéro speaks in Brazilian Portuguese. He pronounces “performance” as “performance-­y,” adding a Brazilian Portuguese intonation to the word. Zeca Ligiéro ingests the word, uses it to fortify himself, and then expresses himself in a Brazilian modality. This serves as a reminder of how terms and concepts become creolized, rerouted as they are rerooted in Brazil and Brazilian Portuguese (or other Latin American countries and their languages), infused by Brazilians with their own creativity, genius, and invention. Performance studies is no steamroller; it is subject, just as all cultural forces are, to the vagaries of transculturation. In pointing out that terms go through a process of transculturation, one must be careful not to evacuate an analysis of power and cultural domination. Describing how ideas flow from the Global South to the Global North and how epistemic categories travel from the Global North to the Global South is not necessarily the same as engaging in Red Guard bullying or a kind of left-­wing intellectual McCarthyism. Prominent and influential scholars in performance studies sometimes lump nuanced critiques together. It is difficult, and probably unfair, to speculate why Schechner and Taylor exaggerate the claims of critics in order to dismiss

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the criticism. In any case, such a posture does not facilitate decolonizing imperial knowledge or open the way to a thorough reconstitution of the academic departments that produce that kind of knowledge. Each chapter in the book so far has identified a different technique or way in which translation (or a refusal to translate) has been bound up with epistemicide. To be sure, they are different in degree and perniciousness. In the next two chapters, we move into a constructive vein, looking at tactics and strategies to confront epistemicide.

CHAPTER 5 LA JOTERÍA Stereoscopic Readings Against Epistemicide

IN ORDER TO COMBAT EPISTEMICIDE, social movements should join each other: this is the recipe supplied by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, inspired by his experiences with the World Social Forum (Santos 2009, 2014). How will these grassroots coalitions be formed? Sousa Santos proposes that “the work of translation creates the conditions for concrete social emancipation of concrete social groups” (Santos 2014). In this view, translation is an emancipatory force. Yet Sousa Santos’s argument begs the question of how that translation will occur, what kind of translation it will be, and who will control the terms of the translation. While translating is an activity that creates linkages, these new translational circuits are not necessarily morally good, nor do they lead inevitably to liberation; some could lead to the erasure of other subaltern concepts, or come into being as a means for material or symbolic appropriation. We have seen, for example, how early bilingual dictionaries flattened subaltern languages and cultures and cast them in the terms of the colonizing culture. In The World Republic of Letters (2007, 42–­43), Pascale Casanova charts how translation has played a central role in an international space dominated by force and invisible violence. These types of translation would seem to be the opposite of what Sousa Santos wants. Translation does not lead to cultural transparency.

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At best, intercultural translation can lead groups to come to a deeper understanding, albeit conditional and provisory. Indeed, for a socially progressive agenda such as Sousa Santos proposes, context counts, and emancipatory theories and methods of translation are required. Such theories and methods, and the translation practices to which they correspond, would have to include criteria by which to evaluate how and whether a given translation contributes to a counterhegemonic global social movement, as distinguished from those that lead to the marginalization, exploitation, criminalization, or distortion of subaltern knowledge. In this chapter, we explore two examples of counterhegemonic translation practices. What is revealed in the examples and the way the translators theorize them are communication challenges not just between groups but also among members of subaltern, racialized groups. In these cases, it is the most vulnerable or marginalized within a group who are most often at risk of harm. “The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend differences,” argues Kimberlé Crenshaw in a classic article, “but rather the opposite—­that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. . . . Ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups” (Crenshaw 1991, 1242; see also Lugones 2007). Drawing on the work of Marilyn Gaddis Rose, I argue that a stereoscopic reading can serve as a decolonial tool to counter epistemicide. In this case, racialized subaltern scholars and activists translate in order to contest hegemonic Eurocentric order. What comes to the forefront are the difficulties of and possibilities for horizontal communication within and across subjugated groups—­that is, translation amid the complexity of multiple axes of power across gender, race, class, and sexual difference. In particular, joto theorizing will serve as an example that acknowledges intersecting differences and that challenges this dominant Eurocentric order. Xamuel Bañales sees joto theorizing as recuperating a term of homophobic opprobium (joto) and employing it as part of a decolonial project: “the resignification of Jotería (and Joto/a) is part of a decolonizing collective movement,” where decolonizing means “the process of undoing the logic of colonization in its present form, described by many scholars as coloniality” (Bañales 2014, 156).

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STEREOSCOPIC READING AS COUNTERHEGEMONIC METHODOLOGY A “stereoscopic” reading, writes theorist Marilyn Gaddis Rose, involves reading a text alongside its translation (Gaddis Rose 1997, 7). In these cases, a translation is read in “stereo” with its source and it is read as an interpretation of its source. In the next section, I describe in greater detail how Gaddis Rose theorizes stereoscopic readings. The methodology of stereoscopic reading can be applied to cultural encounters, I suggest, particularly at points of difference in power. Contemporary Latinx queer theorists Rick Santos and Ernesto Martínez each provide examples of stereoscopic readings as political intervention. Stereoscopic readings can provide critical insight into translations at moments of cultural domination. Stereoscopic readings at these nodal moments can potentially be more than merely interpretive: they can have a transformative effect. In other words, a stereoscopic reading of a cultural encounter interacts with and affects the cultures, languages, and politics it interprets and theorizes. A stereoscopic reading can be a decolonial methodology and can counter epistemicide, if it is applied at points of difference in power and cultural domination and throws those differences into relief or exposes the exercise of linguistic imperialism. In these cases, a stereoscopic reading foregrounds the stakes involved in translating that which would otherwise be forcibly excluded (see E. Said 1994, 66). This method lays the groundwork for intercultural dialogue in a way that is attentive to the politics of context and place. Such a reading fills in the critical gap in Sousa Santos’s theorizing. This chapter is largely methodological, in the sense of specifying and exemplifying an approach to translation. The praxis-­oriented methodology described disrupts attempts at epistemicide. Nevertheless, the moments in which this methodology is employed below are anguished, the protagonists ambivalent, and the situations rife with ambiguity. The stereoscopic reading, in other words, is conducted with attention to the ecologies of reception and transmission in which translations occur (see, e.g., Mufwene 2001), including the full emotional tonalities of the context. One of the innovations of this methodology is that instead of painting translation in terms of loss or betrayal, a stereoscopic method

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frames translation in terms of what new insights and meaning can be gained through it.

INTRODUCTION TO THE METHOD OF STEREOSCOPIC READINGS Contrary to popular belief, argues Marilyn Gaddis Rose, the edges of languages do not have to be framed as walls and barriers. Instead, they can be seen as marking portals and passageways to other languages. Translators, or translations, can guide us through these bridges and tunnels, and in some cases forge these passageways. If we do not juxtapose a work and the translations it elicits, we risk missing many a gift inside the borders. Each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph has a boundary that is more a threshold than a barrier. (Gaddis Rose 1997, 7)

Juxtaposing a text to its translation can lead to textual insights. It lets the reader focus on the deliberative process of intercultural transmission. Built on a structure of both the “original” and its translation, the reading is grounded in several worlds of meaning. The result is a hopeful hermeneutics, emanating from two (or more) centers, predicated on possibility. These worlds, brought into constellation with each other, generate what Gaddis Rose calls an interliminal space of understanding (Gaddis Rose 1997, 7). From this position between texts, Gaddis Rose argues, one can harvest fruit that would be difficult to reach any other way. By reading a translation alongside its source, one can explore meaning—­ semantics—­and the context of the meaning—­pragmatics—­from an unexpected and rewarding angle. This critical angle or metadiscursive level is important since it provides the distance for a social actor, engaged in translation, to analyze the political stakes of a particular translation and therefore to decide how to maneuver politically—­when to translate, when to refuse to translate, how to translate, and for whom, and with what goal or purpose, to translate. The stereoscopic reading is a critical discourse, a metadiscourse that comments on the texts and their interrelation.

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FROM TEXT TO EMBODIED POLITICS Taking a stereoscopic approach to the multiple cultural, social, and political realities that surround us can enhance translation theory, cultural studies, and the study of cultural and political differences. Reading cultural and political formations together assumes a protean and dynamic social and linguistic ecology. Political movements, Joan Scott writes, develop tactically and not logically, improvising appeals, incorporating and adapting various ideas to their particular cause. By conceiving of such movements as mélanges of interpretations and programs (instead of as coherently unified systems of thought) we come closer not only to how they operated but to the web of relationships within which they developed. (1999, 61–­62)

What Scott says of political movements may be said of social dynamism more generally. What is sometimes framed simplistically and reductively as a “culture” or a homogeneous linguistic community is seething with internal differences, striations, and power divides. No culture is internally homogeneous. Similarly, the relationships among cultures are ever changing, as they meld and mix and exchange substances (economic, symbolic, material, linguistic) at many points. Applied to cultural and political movements, stereoscopic readings could elucidate and challenge the meaning of power as it is translated across worlds of sense, with the attendant social elements, emotive coloration, and political contradictions. A stereoscopic reading provides a methodology to contemplate political and social fragmentation without seeking easy, overly simple resolution. Instead, a stereoscopic reading participates in the churning of culture’s internal fractures and fissures, but stirs the potion outward. Placing insurgent translations beside attempts at cultural imperialism, what Edward Said (1994, 66) termed a contrapuntal reading, shows the contours of cultural imperialism.1 In taking up cultural practices of translation, Said’s contrapuntal methodology allows for a focus on the political and ethical dimensions of inequality. The emphasis is on practice 1. Gaddis Rose did not consider overtly unequal social relations.

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and process instead of outcome, product, or target. This terrain is fraught and difficult. While cultural contact in the Americas has often meant conquest, genocide, and domination, reading a text with or against its translations can aid in distilling something like meaning and insight, as well as in challenging hegemonic formations of power and discourse.

“NO TE DEJES” Ernesto Martínez offers himself as an example of how a “queer man of color . . . respond[s] to various forms of gendered violence as a ritual form of male subject formation” (2008). He explores the phrase “no te dejes” in terms of its uses, cultural meanings, and implications for gender formation and gender politics in Latinx communities (Martínez 2014). He uses it, moreover, as a vehicle to reflect on queer Latino masculinities and the possibilities for queer Latinxs to be effective allies to women of color, and in particular to feminists of color. He provides his analysis as part of a theoretical framework he is developing “to better understand queer Latinx forms of embodied consciousness that do not fit conventional expectations of ‘liberatory’ activity in response to oppression” (Martínez 2014, 237; see also, e.g., Rivera-­Servera 2011). He calls the spaces thus created jotería. The roots of jotería theorizing, according to Michael Hames-­García, lie in decolonial feminism and U.S. Latina studies and Chicana studies, in such figures as Sylvia Wynter, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, and others (Hames-­García 2014; Wynter 1990, 1995; Lugones 2007; Sandoval 2000; Hames-­García and Martínez 2011). Understanding this larger theoretical and political context is necessary in order to understand the acts of translation. I quote Martínez at length: For many jotos, the phrase “no te dejes” (which roughly means “don’t let them do that to you,” or “fight back”) will be very familiar, perhaps too familiar in its painfulness. It is a phrase uttered too many times by the people who claim to care for us, to love us. It is a phrase that for some of us has meant not a rescue from violent scenarios, but the opposite: a requirement that we immerse ourselves in violence in order to practice and assert the masculinity that is at risk of being lost. (2014, 240)

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He situates its use: When I think about the phrase “no te dejes,” I think about the part of my youth that I lived in Jalisco—­the state where “men are born”—­and I think about the very strong sense I had growing up that men were never victims. What happened to men is what men let happen to them. Nothing was ever outside of a man’s control: not his body, not his wife, not his children. This was an illusion of remarkable girth and substance, and it was most poignantly evident in the everyday language and behavior that such a worldview nurtured. “No te dejes” was the paradigmatic comment young men made to each other when one man was being subjected to another’s will. “No te dejes,” however, made no judgment on the man who was the aggressor, who was assaulting another man physically or humiliating him with language. “No te dejes” only had purchase on the subjected: its weight hung over men, and their status as men, for what they had let happen or were letting others do to them. Ironically, in such a world there was a very thin line between los hombres (the men) and los otros (the others—­putos, jotos, maricas, and so on). In fact, one was always one or two performatives away from manhood, from establishing it or getting it back. (240)

Martínez juxtaposes the Spanish and the English to initiate his own stereoscopic reading as a thick description at the intersection of homophobia and violent masculine jousting. Martínez’s translation contextualizes “no te dejes” within a cultural and gender politics dense with its associated meanings and gestures. He places the expression, in other words, in the cultural field in which it emerges. Martínez engages in a stereoscopic reading in order to interrogate the radical potential of his inaction: I place a great deal of importance on reframing joto passivity as a form of active subjectivity, and in theorizing inwardness as a form of consciousness and recognition, mostly because it reminds me of how much we forget about the everyday lived minutia of resisting oppressive forces in our lives. I also insist on this reframing because I think it helps us see how docility in the face of violence is actually a route, albeit a counterintuitive one, toward radical meaning making . . . it

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can lead to ways of being, and ways of conceiving of the self, that are substantially at odds with pernicious forms of masculinity. (Martínez 2014, 242–­43)

The active subject treads in the fragility of sense, writes María Lugones (2003, 219). This initiation into radical meaning-­making is not unlike Gloria Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue state, a moment of holding oneself, assimilating previous experiences, and preparing to change (Anzaldúa 1987, 46–­49). But Martínez’s exploration is ambivalent; he wonders if passivity is shameful and worth forgetting. His self-­assured exploration is methodologically combined with a hermeneutics of suspicion and doubt. The combination is a key element of a painfully honest and ethically balanced account of cultural politics on the level of spoken word and embodied gesture. I have asked myself probing, encouraging questions at the top of empty journal pages—­“Neto, piénsale duro, ¿con quién, dónde, y por qué te dejabas?” (with whom, where, and why did you facilitate your own subjection?) Only in the reframing of the question to make explicit the people, the places and the rationales for passivity can I see past the injunction to simply “fight back you fucking puto,” and understand the dimensionality of the issues at hand. (Martínez 2014, 241)

Martínez’s writing is a performative: his essay is a reframing in order to understand the dimensionality of the issues at hand—­gender formation and apparent passivity as the basis for radical political formations. I am taking his decision to translate and juxtapose Spanish and English as a source of semiotic wealth and pragmatic possibility as he seeks to dislodge facile readings of passivity as weakness. At the point of activity—­or inactivity—­the stereoscopic reading he conducts brings us to the point of action—­or tactical, germinative inaction. The exploration grants an afterlife to the phrase “no te dejes”: Martínez’s intense intellectual self-­discovery starts by taking a phrase used to buttress violent assertions of masculinity and, through the exercise, leads the reader to see the possibilities for pro-­feminist men to be allies to women of color.

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I AM YOU BUT I AM NOT YOU Rio de Janeiro. Amid a crowd, I am standing with Rick Santos, a translator and activist, scholar, colleague, and friend. He is Brazilian and also a U.S. citizen. We are demonstrating outside the U.S. consulate in Rio de Janeiro. We are standing with Brazilian workers who are protesting free-­ trade agreements with Brazil. We’re shoved back by the Brazilian security guards who work for the U.S. consulate. We make our way to the front of the crowd. As the action intensifies, I see Rick move away from me, to the line, the epicenter. Rick spontaneously begins interpreting selectively between consulate employees and the crowd. Rick takes up the narrative (these are my notes from his spoken account told to me): The Brazilian consulate guards were like thugs. We were chanting in Portuguese. I thought as long as we were screaming in Portuguese, they wouldn’t listen to us. There was a clean split, a bubble, between English and Portuguese. I wanted to break the split. And I thought of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed [2008]. I started screaming at them in English and thrusting my US passport over. At first the guards pushed back against me, but on hearing the English and seeing my passport, some consulate officials came out to see what was going on. They tried to bring me into the consulate. While the consulate workers were trying to hustle me in, the Brazilian security guards muttered foul threats to me quietly, under their breath, in Portuguese: “Shut the fuck up,” etc. The clean English atmosphere was trying to draw me in. Meanwhile, the consulate’s own guards were saying these brutish or outlandish things to me. I would translate what they were saying into English and say to consular officials, “He’s threatening me.” The consular officials answered that the guards did not have that authority. I was trying to break down the clean break—­the break between the crowd and the people from the embassy, who were using these Brazilians as a buffer. A phony barrier. “We do not condone violence,” they would say to me, and I would say back, “Are you aware that they are threatening me?” “They are not trained,” the officials responded. “They are poorly trained, but we need to keep the consulate protected.” At that point, I turned to the crowd and the guards and said in Portuguese, “They are saying these Brazilian guards are not well-­trained. Are they saying we

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are like savages?” And that of course riled up the crowd even more, this disrespectful way of describing the Brazilians. And I would turn to the guards and say, “This guy said you’re not supposed to threaten us, why are you threatening us?” and I said that to the guards in front of the crowd. At some point the guards just stopped, nonplussed, and looked at the people from the consulate and did not know what to do. Without the translation, the people demonstrating were otherwise cut off from this part of the communication. The people from the consulate were trying to have a private conversation with me but I would translate immediately for the crowd. The consular officials would talk to me as an American, and I was constantly reminding them that I am Brazilian. But I also kept constantly shoving my passport at them, “I’m you,” but I was also saying, “I’m them.” That’s the crux of the thing. The need to break down that barrier: I am you but I am not you. Many of the consular workers had probably lived in Brazil for some time, but they wouldn’t speak Portuguese, and they would condone whatever the guards would do. Meanwhile, they were trying to get me inside to the consulate even while the guards were violently keeping everyone else back, away from the entrance. I shouted, “They are letting me in, give me some literature.” I took in the pamphlets and I sought someone out, and I gave them the literature from the workers’ unions. I kept thinking of Theater of the Oppressed. Boal argues for rupturing the barrier between spectator and actor in a play. The people from the consulate were isolating the play from the crowd, along with the guards. At the time, I saw the guards as complete sell-­outs. I say let’s break down the barrier between play and spectator, and I thought I’d break it through translation. I wanted to break through the language split. These people are saying this, and what do you say to that?

W

The two-­way interpreting Rick effected between Brazilian Portuguese and English revealed to the public in real time how language was being used to exclude. Interpreting (translating) challenged the way English speakers framed space and legitimacy. His interpreting revealed the inherent contradictions, not to mention absurdities, that issue from “legitimacy” in the context of U.S. imperialism. The simultaneous interpretation was

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also a “simultaneous” stereoscopic reading conducted in the street. In the context of a street demonstration, the stereoscopic reading sussed out far more than semantic content or the sound-­shape of language. The reading offered a commentary on the pragmatics of power; it questioned the authority of surrogate power to issue threats, and its institutional backing; it violated linguistic division while participating in mass mobilization against neoliberal reform. In this way, it participated in the realignment of power—­the “small acts” of which Howard Zinn (2004) once wrote, the “endless succession of surprises” unfolding in an infinite succession of presents, in defiance of inequity, toward a more just social organization.2

CONCLUSION Stereoscopic readings can expose—­and counter—­attempts at cultural and linguistic domination that lead to cultural and linguistic erasure. Political change, furthermore, can unfold as part of the activity of translating itself. The embodied practices of translation transmit knowledge, but the knowledge goes beyond language. Ernesto Martínez refers to “embodied consciousness,” which he glosses as “nonpropositional knowledge: wisdom that people have about the world that cannot always be expressed through words, concepts, or theories, but that is often evident in behaviors” (2014, 237). Analysis of moments of embodied consciousness, especially as they are manifest in political enactment, can offer a theory of change. Martínez demonstrates how inaction can also offer the elements of a theory of change. Let’s return to Joan Scott’s theory of change in her study of political movements: A full study of [a movement’s] discourse, however, could give insight not only into the particular politics of that movement but into the processes by which social relationships were conceived and constructed. . . . A theory of meaning that assumes a multiplicity of references, a resonance beyond literal utterances, a play across topics and spheres makes it possible to grasp how connections and interactions work. When such 2. “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world” (Zinn 2004).

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a theory posits the multiple and contested aspects of all definitions, it also contains a theory of change since meanings are said to be open to reinterpretation, restatement, and negation. The questions, of course, are: how, by whom, and in what contexts do these reformulations take place? (1999, 66)

Ernesto Martínez provides an example of how research can proceed. Martínez’s acts of self-­translation work toward the reformulation of utterances and phrases that circulate, and of politics itself, including the politics of multilingualism, queer positionality, passivity, forgetting, and shame. Rick Santos relates a praxis of stereoscopic reading that transforms its own ground, building on the Brazilian tradition of consciousness-­raising using the transformative invisible theater techniques of Augusto Boal. My analysis has taken these moments of reflective, critical cultural and political encounter as the point of departure. I am not reading the moments as “texts,” but rather as enactments of cultural politics. Xamuel Bañales has described decolonial methodologies as involving the inseparability, overlapping, and interrelatedness of art, activism, and scholarship that seek to humanize marginalized perspectives as they transcend the colonizing aspects of Western culture. This methodology challenges dominant values, relationships, attitudes, institutions, and society by providing collective ways of being and knowing from below. It seeks to unite the mind, body, and spirit, which have become estranged from each other in modern/colonial times. (2014, 161)

Self-­translation across worlds of meaning resonates differently in each. It is at these moments that translations begin as interpretations but ultimately involve defiance and critique, even the frank self-­critique that Martínez models. Neither Martínez nor Santos engages in unequivocal celebration of living life in translation; rather, they mine the hard truths to be gained through the often agonistic, conflictual process of shuttling back and forth. They demonstrate how meaning and politics are refracted across languages.

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Applying a stereoscopic reading has been crucial to see how Martínez and Santos translate, and translate themselves. It is necessary to look at concrete examples and to provide a methodology, because, taken alone, translation is not necessarily a liberating activity. Indeed, it is only in the switchbacks and eddies of a particular activity that one can see the real potential for, as well as the real barriers to, coalition building against oppressive cultures, knowledges, identities, and practices. In his 2009 book The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond, Sousa Santos outlines how a “popular university” could translate between social movements. Sousa Santos’s proposal is a systematic, administrative way to organize translation across social movements. The goal is “to construct new and plural conceptions of social emancipation” (Santos 2009, 145–­46). The examples here represent a more anarchic approach to translation in the midst of political struggle—­although in each case, the translator has subjected their activity to scrupulous retrospective analysis (perhaps it is more of an anarchist’s approach than an anarchic approach). The social actors interpret within the tumult and disorder of social and political clashes. They live in translation: interpreting back and forth becomes an ontological activity.

CONCLUSION An Ethics and Politics of Bewilderment

THE FIRST TIME I VISITED Colombia, I met geologist and environmental activist Julio Fierro. Over the last several decades, Fierro has been part of social movements against the predations of the transnational mining and petroleum corporations that have left so much environmental destruction and social displacement in their wake throughout Latin America and elsewhere. Fierro asked me for my impressions of Colombia. After we talked, he handed me a copy of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación de los naufragios (1542), a chronicle by an early colonizer (it has been variously translated as The Account of Cabeza de Vaca, Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures, the Adventure, etc.). Reading the narrative took me down a rabbit hole. In the sixteenth century, Cabeza de Vaca and three hundred other would-­be conquistadores were forced to land on the coast of Florida, having weathered significant mishaps and losses along the way. The remaining crew started out with the arrogance and cupidity common among the Spanish or Castilians of that time. Cabeza de Vaca tells us that they sacked Native villages for food and kidnapped Indigenous people to force them to serve as guides.1 But eventually, wracked by hunger 1. Cabeza de Vaca often does not provide names for particular Indigenous nations, so

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and cold, their numbers decimated by doomed efforts to get back out to sea and by the unhappy skirmishes they provoked, the Spanish party is reduced to fewer than ten. Los que quedamos escapados, desnudos como nascimos, i perdido todo lo que traíamos: i aunque todo valía poco, para entonces valía mucho. Y como entonces era por Noviembre, i el frío mui grande, i nosotros tales, que con poca dificultad nos podían contar los huesos, estábamos hechos propia figura de la Muerte. (Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 2004, 312–­13) (The survivors escaped naked [desnudos] as they were born, with the loss of all they had; and although the whole was of little value, at that time it was worth much, as we were then in November, the cold was severe, and our bodies were so emaciated the bones might be counted with little difficulty, having become the perfect figures of death.) (Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 1907, 46)

Let us focus on this concept of desnudez or nakedness. Ilan Stavans has remarked on how it suggests vulnerability, embarrassment, and even bewilderment (2002, viii). Cabeza de Vaca is frank and unromantic in describing how graceless, helpless, and abject he and his fellow Europeans were. Stripped of their armor and stratagem, unprotected by the institutional, military, and symbolic power of Castile, wounded and cold from exposure to the elements, the Spaniards lose their pride and aloofness. “The self-­portrait that emerges . . . is one colored by stupefaction” (Stavans 2002, ix). Cabeza de Vaca is unsure how to proceed. At his urging, the group humbly seeks refuge with the local Indigenous people: “determinamos de hacer lo que la necesidad pedía, que era invernar allí” (we yielded obedience to what necessity required, to pass the winter in the place where we were) (Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 2004, 318; Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 1907, 49). The people he meets are obviously moved by the Spaniards’ condition and agree to take them in.2 subsequent archaeologists and historians have been left to speculate about whom he may have encountered. 2. Alex Krieger ventures that Cabeza de Vaca may have been aided by the Karankawa (Krieger 2002, 27).

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This is the beginning of a psychic shift for Cabeza de Vaca. He, along with the remaining three sailors, including Esteban, an enslaved Moroccan they brought with them on their ship, begin to live among the Indigenous peoples they encounter, gathering food and eating with them (see also Lalami 2014). Then they wander on, lost, sharing the trials of the people they live among. Cabeza de Vaca records Indigenous customs in his Chronicle. They drift for years across what is now the southwest United States. Cabeza de Vaca emphasizes his nakedness throughout: “Fueron casi seis Años el tiempo que Yo estuve en esta Tierra solo entre ellos, i desnudo, como todos andaban” (For nearly six years, I was alone among them, and naked like all of them); “Anduvimos desnudos” (We went around naked) (Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 2004). At the end of his journey, having crossed through parts of present-­day Texas and Mexico to what may have been present-­day Sonora or Sinaloa, Cabeza de Vaca discovers, to his shame and horror, other Spaniards, fellow “Christians,” as he refers to them, massacring and enslaving Indigenous people. He confronts them, quarrels with them over the treatment of the Indigenous people, and finally condemns them in disgust. He tries to warn the Indigenous people and advises them to flee. He calls the language they speak “Primahaitu” (Cabeza de Vaca [1542] 1907, 130), which at least one scholar thinks may refer to O’odham of the Akimel O’odham people (Gil-­Osle 2018), or which may have been a lingua franca among groups in the region (Krieger 2002, 129–­30). Cabeza de Vaca records with obvious wonder the Indigenous people’s reaction to the Spanish colonizers: Entre si platicaban, diciendo, que los Cristianos mentían, porque nosotros veníamos de donde salía el Sol, i ellos donde se pone: i que nosotros sanábamos los enfermos, i ellos mataban los que estaban sanos: i que nosotros veníamos desnudos, i descalços, i ellos vestidos, i en Caballos, i con Lanças: i que nosotros no teníamos codicia de ninguna cosa, antes todo quanto nos daban, tornábamos luego a dar, i con nada nos quedábamos, i los otros no tenían otro fin, sino robar todo quanto hallaban, i nunca daban nada a nadie. (Cabeza de Vaca [1555] 2003) (Among themselves they would comment that the Christians lied because we [Cabeza de Vaca and his small company] came from where

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the sun rises and they [the other Spaniards] came from where the sun sets, and that we cured the sick and they killed those who were healthy, and that we came naked and barefoot and they were clothed and on horseback with lances, and that we were not greedy for anything but everything that was given to us we in turn gave to others and kept nothing, and [they] had no other purpose but to steal everything they found and never give anything to anyone.) (translation in Krieger 2002, 231–­32)

How did Cabeza de Vaca come to be that sort of person whom the Indigenous people praised in this way? Shorn of his haughty indifference, by the end of his account he is scandalized by the comportment of his compatriots. But he is also off-­ balance, unclear of his status or where he stands: Is he like other “Christians”? Or are the Indigenous people right, and has he become someone essentially different? Instead of sealing himself off from these perspectives and experiences as the other Spaniards did, he opens himself to them. For Cabeza de Vaca, desnudo connotes this liminal vulnerability he comes to occupy. He immerses himself in another reality, playing on a set of terms with which he is unfamiliar and sensing acutely that they are another’s. In short, he enters the substance of the Americas. Desnudo captures that state. When Julio Fierro lent me Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle, he meant it as a friendly gesture, but he also intended it as a challenge, a riddle, and a pedagogy, in the tradition of the riddle of the Sphinx: As a Euro-­American, what is my place in this strange continent? Let’s take this as a question of translation: How to translate desnudo into English? As I have indicated above, desnudo is an everyday word in Spanish with a similar range to that denoted by naked in English. On the face of it, and without context, to translate desnudo as “bewildered” is to make an idiosyncratic choice and select a misleading English term. By recapping the experiences and sensibilities of Cabeza de Vaca, however, I hope I have shed a bit more light on the particular social history of desnudo as a concept in Cabeza de Vaca’s work. “Bewilderment” might capture something of his particular sense of being desnudo that goes beyond physical nakedness. Cabeza de Vaca encourages readers (or at least this reader) to give themselves over to the epistemic dissonance that comes from a severe

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shock to the system, a dislocation from one’s given view of the world, even one’s way of being in the world. He writes of trying to navigate the translational dissonance between a sense of colonial entitlement and his increasingly obvious sense that it is an impoverished framework for interpreting what he is encountering—­a framework that is epistemically, linguistically, and morally inadequate insofar as it is rapacious and dehumanizing of others. His experience of the dissonance is embodied and concrete: he is naked, and he enters what is for him (though not for the people who live there) a wilderness. Bewilderment is a somatic experience. Taking up desnudo or desnudez from that time and space and placing it alongside a translation, as desnudo/bewildered, is to perform what I called in the last chapter a “stereoscopic” reading (Gaddis Rose 1997, 7). Juxtaposing and pairing the two words reveals something important about translating across the North-­South divide. Reading desnudez alongside bewilderment chips away at divisions that exist: the geographic, linguistic, and historical line that we gringos are accustomed to put up to distinguish ourselves as Anglo-­Americans from the rest of the inhabitants of the Americas, which allows us to participate in the illusion of an uninterrupted pedigree and continuity with European thought (see Price 2004). The conjunction “desnudo/bewildered” describes a predisposition to thinking emanating from the Americas, a rigor tempered by an epistemic humility. As Cabeza de Vaca came to use it, “desnudo/bewildered” implies a critique of Eurocentrism, racism, and Eurocentric violence. This conjunction of terms implies an openness to the vast terrain outside the reason or rationality held up as sovereign in a spent Western tradition, that reason predicated on excluding the presumed irrationality and inferiority of its alterities. The challenge in finding an adequate translation for desnudo points to a more basic problem. Cabeza de Vaca’s bewilderment speaks to his location at the moment of this clash of powers between the West and the non-­West, and the asymmetric conflict of languages and epistemologies that resulted, and which we are living in the present day. Taking on desnudez/bewilderment is a way to question one’s own need for protection, and to conceive of translation as the possibility of being transformed. Desnudez/bewilderment captures the hesitancy

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engendered by catching a glimpse or a glimmer of alternative constructions of the world one has walled off in the name of allegiance to an imagined, and rather narrow, account of Western rationality (see Santos 2004). Decolonial translators and theorists of translation can attest and attend to the plurality of worlds, since their training equips them to encounter that plurality (Lugones 2003). They can act in the service of plurality, since they are by vocation and disposition in the domain of struggle for counterconceptualizations, countervoicings, counterpractices, countermemories, and counterhistories. Decolonial translators or translation theorists include Gloria Wekker (2006), Claudia de Lima Costa (2014), José María Arguedas (see chapter 2), Tarek Mehanna (see chapter 3), Ernesto Martínez (see chapter 5), Rick Santos (see chapter 5), Vicente Rafael (2016, 1996), PJ DiPietro (2016), and countless others. They justify their decision to take sides, demonstrating why and for whose benefit they translate. They also account for their understandings of their roles, whether as faithful scribes, witnesses, mediators, or advocates. They grapple with epistemicide and inchoate futures that underscore the geographic, bodily, political, material, cultural, erotic, and linguistic dimensions of translation in a context of (neo)colonial hierarchy and heteronormativity. They translate for an imagined future of which we can only discern the outline—­an uncertain future. Decolonial translators have gone down avenues that move us partly outside imperial knowledge. Such translators translate into a political language and political geography that may not yet fully exist. What Boaventura de Sousa Santos says of critical theory is true of decolonial practices of translation: A critical theory is premised on the idea that there is no way of knowing the world better than by anticipating a better world. Such anticipation provides both the intellectual instruments to unmask the institutionalized, harmful lies that sustain and legitimate social injustice and the political impulse to struggle against them. (Santos 2014, viii)

Decolonial translations are similarly motivated by, and premised on, the belief that the world can be a better place. These translations are aspirational insofar as they attempt to translate for a world that is only

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incipient. It is these communities or social movements, partly imagined, partly real, from which they receive their impetus and within which their translations make sense. These social or artistic movements are based on a sort of prophetic counterfactual: an imagined future. They are situated, then, within an oppositional worldview or perspective that is not fully realized. These worldviews may be unthinkable or unimaginable within the dominant Western or Anglo sensibility (Trouillot 2015). In order to illustrate this last point, let us conclude with a few examples. We can start with Marina Sitrin’s Horizontalism (2006), an oral history that captures the voices of the participants in a popular revolt in Argentina after the credit default of 2001. Sitrin first published it in Spanish and then translated it herself into English. In her translator’s notes, which she entitles “Translating we walk,” she comments: What I’ve chosen to do with this translation is to retain certain words that don’t make immediate sense in English, leaving room for new meanings and significations. This process requires the patience of an understanding reader. As many of the people I interview remind us, old words cannot define new things—­a new language is necessary. However, a dilemma arises when that new language is developing in Spanish and we, who speak English, generally do not yet share the experiences that are creating a new vocabulary. This is where the patience comes in. We must try to listen to the experience before attempting to translate it into the language of our experience. (Sitrin 2006, v)

This new process of translation “is first and foremost a participatory political process. New movements put new demands and expectations on translators and editors” (vi). Besides the title and its variants (such as “horizontality”), she takes up autogestión and política afectiva: Autogestión is a word that has no exact English translation. Historically, the anarchist idea of self-­management comes closest to its current use in Argentina’s movements. Autogestión is not based in the what, but in the how. It is the relationships among people that create a particular project, not simply the project itself. It is a word reflecting an autonomous and collective practice. . . . I have sometimes left this word in Spanish to emphasize these many meanings.

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Affective politics: One way people in the movements describe the territory they are creating is through the idea of política afectiva. They are affective in the sense of creating affection, creating a base that is loving and supportive, the only base from which one can create politics. (vii)

It is important to underscore that the referents for these words are emergent, or “being born.” “One must be simultaneously open to a new unfamiliar vocabulary and also understand that familiar words might signify in new ways” (vi). Other words, such as dignity, she infuses with new meaning: Dignity: On the surface, dignity is a word that is easily understood in English, but it has taken on important connotations in the movements in Argentina. . . . The word now, especially for those in the occupied and recuperated factories, as well as the unemployed workers’ movements, represents the self-­organization and autonomy of working without bosses or hierarchy. (vii)

Sitrin’s vocabulary emerges from the movements she studies, just as the conceptual framework emerges from the politics in which that framework is embedded. The politics have an affective as well as a cognitive dimension. It is a politics, as she puts it, based on social relationships and love. In a related vein, she makes a point to say “we believe” rather than “we think” since “we believe” has an emotional tonality that “we think” lacks (viii). She consciously violates the reason/emotion distinction embedded in Western philosophical traditions at least since Descartes. Sitrin points out that many people use the present progressive tense: “we are creating,” not “we create.” This reflects for her an everyday politics that emphasizes processes rather than finished products (Sitrin 2006, viii). Sitrin’s observation leads to another example, drawn from a translation I undertook with my colleague the philosopher María Lugones. We translated the Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch’s book El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (1979) as Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (2010). Like Sitrin, Kusch also points out how Latin Americans frequently use verbs to express temporary states or unfinished actions (for example, “estoy trabajando” [I am working] instead of “yo trabajo” [I work]). Kusch suggests this everyday usage captures a tentative, protean subject in a shifting, unstable universe, “as if whatever

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one is doing were the momentary product of a great instability which hovers in an unseen background” (2010, 159). We had to wrestle with Kusch’s engagement with the emotional dimension of thinking, what is now sometimes referred to as sentipensar (though he does not use that term), and his description of the use of estar (to be) in Latin America generally, and Argentinean Spanish in particular. Ambitiously, we sought to perform an intervention in the English language that we hoped will be useful, “particularly in expressing the possibility of liberation in América” (Lugones and Price 2010, lv). A chief concern was how to translate Kusch without domesticating (or colonizing) his thought (lv–­lvi). A key linguistic distinction in Spanish marks for Kusch this instability of the Latin American reality. This is the distinction between estar and ser, common verbs that mean “to be.” Elementary students of Spanish learn that estar refers to temporary states—­“I am sitting” or “I am sad”—­ and ser to permanent states or characteristics: “I am tall.” In English, we do not mark the distinction with separate verbs. For Kusch, the difference marks a distinction between, on the one hand, a Western conceptualization of subject-­object relations, corresponding to ser, in which the world is fixed, definable, knowable, and subject to the laws of cause and effect, and, on the other hand, an “unstable relation among the elements of the cosmos,” signified by estar (Lugones and Price 2010, lviii). We tried to introduce this philosophical distinction into our English translation, not only because it was key for Kusch, but also because we thought it could be a useful contribution to English-­language philosophy. Another word that presented a challenge was the América in the title of Kusch’s book. As with estar, América was a key term. Why retain the accent in América? I quote at length our discussion: When Kusch describes “América,” he depicts a repressed reality, a form of thinking that furnishes and connotes the [authentic but] suppressed experience of millions of people in their everyday lives. We have kept América because the accent marks a difference from what would be known and familiar to the English-­language reader. It provides a certain textual resistance to the reader, a defamiliarization with the continent as she or he knows it. The accent makes the word, and its referent, harder to assimilate to a pre-­existing understanding of this continent. Like a fish bone, the accent may make the text a bit harder to digest, which is our

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intention, just as the thinking itself cannot be absorbed by a body that wants to enrich itself through the obliteration of all traces of this other thinking. (Lugones and Price 2010, lxix)

The image of the fish bone comes from art historian Laura Pérez’s (1999) image of the Chicanx. We continue: América for Kusch houses a metaphysic, a form of life that moves according to its own rhythm. In keeping with his desire to uncover, we would like to expand the conceptual possibilities for this other América without incorporating it within a dominant understanding of the continent. Many of the alternatives for translating the term América bear this out. “Latin America” would seem an obvious choice; but this would not include the Hopi and Navajo and other Indigenous peoples who live in what is now referred to as North America, and who are clearly featured as part of Kusch’s América. We also contemplated translating América as “the Americas.” Presumably, this would have included the entire continent. However, the Americas is embedded in a European optic of the continent, and perhaps preserves the antiquated tone which suggests European “discovery” of new lands. América, on the other hand, keeps the reader within another optic, an alternative set of perceptions and understandings that the English reader must grope for, because América is not so readily within one’s grasp. (Lugones and Price 2010, lxix–­lxx)

We thought that retaining the accent could trouble the taken-­for-­granted notion of “America” that an English-­language reader might have, and push instead for new conceptual, geographic, and political horizons. In an essay on her translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990), which she translated as Poetics of Relation (1997), Betsy Wing comments on Glissant’s use of “Relation”: Our communication is ripe for Relation. Relation is non-­linear, it implies a potential synchronicity, where encounters in time and space are not functions of chance but of the emergence of new meaning. . . . Elsewhere is not a threatening or beckoning “Other,” it is all around us—­an associative network of relation—­exchange—­transformation. (Wing 2012, 103)

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One of the characteristics of these practices of communication, exchange, and translation that strike against imperial expansion is a conscious focus on multilingual, multilateral relationships. For Glissant, Relation is “a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry” (Glissant 1997, 34). Sometimes, through a translator’s efforts, new meanings emerge. Here is Glissant on creolization (in Betsy Wing’s English version): Creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts. . . . Creolization carries along then into the adventure of multilingualism and into the incredible explosion of cultures. But the explosion of cultures does not mean they are scattered or mutually diluted. It is the violent sign of their consensual, not imposed, sharing. (Glissant 1997, 33–­34)

This approach to translation can be contrasted with a translation strategy that tries to domesticate the foreign. Disciplining Caribbean or Latin American thinking (or “Américan” thinking) by imposing academic categories that emerge from the Global North is one way of domesticating the foreign, of fending off bewilderment. If we look at the examples together, the translators emphasize the themes and language of possibility, of liberation, of coming up with approaches to translation that are not merely consonant with but even emerge from the texts they are translating. Translation here violates the reason/emotion, mind/body split. It may involve somatic knowledge (Wing 2012, 105), or sentipensar (Lugones and Price 2010, lxiii; Guerrero 2012, 200; Escobar 2020), or affective politics (Sitrin 2006, vii). These translations remind us that no translation has a fixed and fully formed meaning. In Sitrin’s Horizontalism and Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thought we see terms untranslated and then glossed. The explanation of key terms then becomes a means to theorize translation itself and offer a path to epistemic liberation. Glossing key terms in this way makes for a translation that adds levels of epistemic and linguistic complexity rather than reducing translation to the search for a ready-­made equivalent. Thus, to

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explain key terms in this way becomes a way to do metatheory as a means to chart a decolonial future. And should this be so strange? English-­language translators conventionally leave key words untranslated and then explain them when they translate from established European thinkers. We use Dasein when we discuss Heidegger, for example, or différance in Derrida, and translators coin neologisms in English to encompass concepts such as overdetermination. But there is a logic to this: the language of Eurocentric thinkers is valorized and treated as rich and valuable enough to be preserved or to contribute to English. It is not merely a question of translating from Latin American terms as a way to expand English. What I like about these examples is that the style does not conform to Anglo-­American norms of simplicity, succinctness, and plainness (Bennett 2007; Cameron 1995). Let’s conclude with nakedness, disorientation, and even a bit of anguish. There can be beauty in the disorder and in the unfinished nature of the continent. In Calle 13’s song “Vamo’ a portarnos mal,” Residente raps, “El desorden / es tu penicilina” (Disorder is your penicillin). This book has contraposed order and disorder, struggles for control over meaning. From a colonial standpoint, translation represents one effective method to domesticate social forces that threaten that order. Jihad is criminalized, performance studies disciplines Latin American creative expression, bilingual dictionaries force Indigenous ontologies and cosmologies into commensuration with Western concepts. Yet we need not adopt this approach to translation. Jazz is what America will sound like when it becomes itself, Wynton Marsalis once remarked (quoted in Burns 2003). Jazz anticipates another, better world, a decolonial or decolonized world. Marsalis’s characterization of jazz as enacting a possible future within a troubled present suggests a possibility. Moving beyond the provincial confines of the United States to a hemispheric or global scope, I would like to ask, with humility: How can we contribute to building expansive futures without domesticating those potential futures within the current limits of our language and our imagination? How can we translate for a future that calls to us, a future whose shape we cannot see, a delicate future that does not belong to us, and whose denizens speak languages we do not yet know how to speak?

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INDEX

9/11 (September 11, 2001), translating as terrorism after, 78, 79, 93\ Abdel Rahman, Sheik Omar, terrorism trial of, 87–­89, 92, 105 activists, 150; activist translation, 77–­87, 103–­5, 145–­49, 156–­57 African diaspora, 6–­7 Akimel O’odham, 152 América, retaining the accent in the translation, 157–­59. See also Americas American Translators Association, 90 Americas: decolonial translation in, 53–­ 74, 150–­61; intimidating translators in the US as part of the war on terror, 75–­106; Latinx queer activists and theorists, 22, 139–­49; marginalization of Latin American intellectuals, 53–­ 74; missionaries in Latin America in colonial period, 23–­52; performance studies in Latin America, 107–­36; translating América, 157–­59; translation as epistemicide in, 3–­22 Andrade, Oswald de, 127

Anglocentrism, 129 Anglophone hegemony, 4n1, 7, 14; and Brazilian protests, 145–­46; and epistemicide, 18–­19, 21, 66, 109, 129; and performance studies, 109, 113–­36 Anguish: “Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish,” (José María Arguedas), 20, 52, 53–­74; method of translation, 52–­74, 139, 161 “Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish,” (José María Arguedas), translation of “Entre el kechwa y el castellano, la angustia del mestizo,” 20, 52, 53–­74 anticolonial writers, 53–­67, 71–­74, 127. See also decolonial translation practice anti-­theory, 65 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 142 Arab Americans, jailed for interpreting, 20–­21, 75–­94, 103–­6 Arabic, 14–­15, 75–­94, 103–­6 Arab people, 9, 44, 109. See also Arab Americans; Arabic Argentina, 47–­50, 117, 156–­59

184 INDEX

Arguedas, José María: as decolonial translator, 56–­67, 71–­74, 155; “Entre el kechwa y el castellano, la angustia del mestizo” (“The Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish”), 20, 52, 53–­74; and incommensurability, 20, 59–­65, 72; to translate oneself, 12 assemblage (criminal or terrorist), 79, 87, 104, 105 Aymara: and bilingual dictionaries, 23, 25, 29, 32–­34, 36–­41, 51; as incommensurate with other languages, 5, 20 Benjamin, Walter, 55, 59–­71, 73–­74 Bertonio, Ludovico, 5, 23, 24; legacies, 51; Vocabulario de la lengua aymara (1612), 29, 32–­34, 36–­41 bewilderment, as decolonial posture, 22, 151, 153–­54, 160 biopiracy or bioprospecting, 107 Black struggle, 16–­17, 54, 84; “Black” as translation for noir or nègre, 17; Black performance scholars, 110, 119, 120–­21; translation of, 16–­17 Boal, Augusto, 145, 146, 148 border: between languages, 140; disciplinary, 133; US/Mexico, 95–­103 Brazil: translation amidst political protest, 145–­48; translating performance studies, 116, 120–­28, 135 Catholicism: missionary work and translation, 4–­10, 23–­52; as racial marker, 33–­36; and Spain, 4–­10, 20, 78, 116–­17, 152–­53 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez: as desnudo or naked, 22, 151–­53; as early chronicler, 22, 150–­54; referring to other Spaniards as “cristianos,” 34, 152–­53; Relación de los naufragios (1542), 150–­54 Camayd-­Freixas, Erik, court interpreter for largest immigration raid in US history, 21, 77, 95–­106

Campos, Haroldo and Augusto de, and “anthropophagic” approach to translation, 127 Candomblé, 9 “Cannibalist Manifesto” (Oswald de Andrade), 127 Caribbean, 9–­10, 134, 160 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 34–­35, 36n8 Castellano. See Spanish (language) Castile, Kingdom of. See Spain Castilian. See Spanish (language) Chicanxs, 113, 142–­44, 159 Chilam Balam, 28, 45 Christian: Catholic Spain, 4–­10, 20, 78, 152–­53; missionary work and translation, 4–­10, 23–­52; as racial marker, 33–­36 citizenship, 77–­106, 145–­49; performance of, 111 Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, 29n5, 30, 31, 32, 36, 36n8 Colombia, 150 colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15 colonialism: classifying as a means of, 5–­15, 19–­22; decolonial feminism, 10, 13, 15; decolonial practices as contesting, 137–­61; and epistemicide, 3, 23–­74, 75–­106; and jihad, 84–­86; through marginalizing subaltern intellectuals, 53–­74; and race, 33–­36, 77–­78, 80, 104; translation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, 37–­52, 150–­54; translation as a tool of, 3, 4n1, 6, 8, 23–­74, 75–­106. See also decolonial translation practice coloniality: colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15; definition, 10; and the jotería, 138; of knowledge, 72; linguistic hierarchy, 118; modernity/ coloniality group, 56, 108; translators and, 6, 8 commensuration, translation as, 3, 20, 37–­52

INDEX 185

Conquest, the, 4–­11; Arguedas and Quechua, 56–­67; performance during, 116; and vocabularies, 23–­52 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 44–­45, 55, 58, 63, 66 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, and intersectionality, 138 Creolize: concepts, 135; Glissant and, 160 criminalization of translation, translators, 3, 15, 18, 19, 21, 75–­106 criollo intellectuals and translation, 8 cristiano: Catholic Spain, 4–­10, 20, 78, 152–­53; missionary work and translation, 4–­10, 23–­52; as racial marker, 33–­36, 152 decolonial feminism, 10, 13, 15, 142, 161 decolonial translation practice, 3, 19–­22, 46–­73, 108, 138–­49, 153–­61 Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 20–­21, 75–­76, 79, 95–­104 desnudez (nakedness) as a state of vulnerability and decolonial posture, 22, 151–­54 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. See Santos, Boaventura de Sousa dictionaries, bilingual: means of epistemicide, 23–­52; method of analysis, 11; role in colonization, 5–­6, 20, 23–­52, 65, 131, 137, 161 DiPietro, PJ, 155 disembodied epistemology, 53–­54, 66–­67 Du Bois, W. E. B., 54 Dussel, Enrique, 10, 57, 66 ecology, linguistic, 139–­41 empire: academic imperialism, 107–­36; decolonial practices as contesting, 137–­61; and race, 33–­36, 77–­78, 80, 104; Spanish, 23–­52; translation as instrument of, 3–­22 English-­language hegemony. See Anglophone hegemony

epistemicide: analytical limits, 16–­19; brief typology of, 18–­22; as aspect of coloniality, 10, 23–­74, 75–­106; combating through translation, 137–­49, 150–­61; through commensuration, 3, 23–­52; definition, 3; as intellectual piracy, 107–­36; involving authorities, 6; as racialization of language, 13, 33–­36, 59–­60; refusal to translate, 14–­15; through criminalizing translators and translations, 75–­106; through epistemic marginalization, 3, 11, 43–­44, 53–­74, 79, 91, 93, 104, 138–­49; translation as, 3–­9, 12 epistemic imperialism, 4, 135 epistemic injustice, 7 epistemic marginalization, 3, 11, 20, 43–­ 44, 53–­74, 79, 91, 93, 104, 138–­49 estar, v. ser, and translating ontology in the Americas, 158 eurocentrism: alternatives to, 55–­57, 66, 138, 154–­61; and bilingual dictionaries, 29, 39–­40; logic of, 6, 34n6, 66, 74, 107–­11, 115, 118, 39–­40; and modernity, 10, 13, 15; and scholarship, 53–­74; tie to epistemicide, 13; translators destabilizing, 7, 56–­67, 71–­74, 139–­42, 145–­49 extractivism: performance studies as, 107–­36; translation as, 3, 15 feminism: critique of the colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15; critique of disembodied epistemology, 66–­67n6, 119, 142 French language and colonialism, 4, 8, 13, 14, 16–­17, 56, 66, 109 Gaddis Rose, Marilyn, and stereoscopic readings, 21, 138–­41, 154 gender: colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15, 155; gender studies as imperialist, 133; heteronormativity, 10, 155; hierarchy, 8, 10, 13, 15; performing, 111;

186 INDEX

queer theorizing, 22, 139–­49; translating, 12–­13; translating “queer,” 6, 126; translocation, 12 Glissant, Édouard: forced poetics, 59, 64; translating Poétique de la relation, 159–­60; vehicular languages, 66 Global North, 53–­54, 107–­10, 135, 160 Global South: intellectuals from, 53–­74; and neocolonial imposition, 14–­15; as raw material, 73, 107–­8, 115, 118 Gómez-­Peña, Guillermo, 112–­13 Gonçález Holguín, Diego, author of Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua, o del Inca (1608), 5, 24, 36–­ 37, 39–­40, 43–­44 Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 28, 41n11, 45, 59 Guaraní, 4, 5, 25, 27 heterogeneity, 9, 28–­29; and Arguedas, 58; and terrorist assemblage, 79, 105 homunculi, 6 horizontalism (horizontality), 156, 160 hybridity: cultural, 9; hybrid neologisms, 5, 17, 26, 28, 41; scholars, 8, 30, 45, 57–­67, 71–­74. See also Arguedas, José María; heterogeneity; transculturation ICE, 95–­103 imperialism: academic, 107–­36; decolonial practices as contesting, 137–­61; and racism, 33–­36, 77–­78, 80, 104; Spanish, 23–­52; translation as instrument of, 3–­22. See also colonialism Inca. See Quechua incommensurate. See commensuration “Indians” (Indigenous to the Americas). See Aymara; Indigeneity; Indigenous nations; mestizo/x; Nahua (people); Nahuatl (language); Quechua (language); Quechua (people); race Indigeneity: in the colonial era, 23–­52, 150–­55; cosmologies, 23–­52; epistemi-

cide, 3–­18; marginalization, 23–­74; and performance, 114–­16, 120–­21; as raw material, 73, 107; and transculturation, 9–­10; as undocumented, 79, 96–­103; war on terror, 96–­103. See also Aymara; Indigenous nations; mestizo/x; Nahua (people); Nahuatl (language); Quechua (language); Quechua (people); race Indigenous nations: Akimel O’odham, 152; Guaraní, 4, 5, 14, 25, 27; Karankawa, 7; Mapudungun, 25; Maya, 4, 8, 28, 96–­ 103; Purépecha, 5, 25; Stó:lō, 46, 47, 49; Taíno, 8, 9; as undocumented, 96–­103. See also Aymara; mestizo/x; Nahua (people); Nahuatl (language); Quechua (language); Quechua (people) intercultural dialogue, 139 intercultural translation, 8, 71, 138, 140 interpretation (between languages). See interpreters interpreter code of ethics, 90, 100 interpreters: and colonization, 4, 7–­14, 26, 28–­29, 31; criminalization of, 3, 20, 75–­ 79, 87–­95, 103–­6; decolonial, 21–­22, 145–­47, 149; and the war on terror, 3, 20, 75–­79, 87–­106. See also translation intersectionality, 138 Isabel, Queen, 4 Islam: Catholic attitudes towards, 6, 35, 57; Islamophobia, 75, 94, 105; Muslim interpreters on trial, 20–­21, 75, 95–­103; racialization, 77–­86, 88, 89 Islamophobia, 75, 94, 105; Muslim interpreters on trial, 20–­21, 75, 95–­103 Ixtlilxóchitl, Fernando de Alva, 28 jihad: as pseudo-­untranslatable, 14–­15, 81; translation of in the context of the war on terror, 75, 79–­87, 103, 105, 161 jotería, 137–­45 joto theorizing, 137–­45 Kechwa. See Quechua (language); Quecha (people)

INDEX 187

Kothari, Rita, 4n1, 19, 84n12, 104n20 Kusch, Rodolfo, 157–­59 Latin America: decolonial translation in, 150–­61; as fodder for Western theory, 107–­36; intimidating translators in the US as part of the war on terror, 75–­ 106; Latinx queer theorists, 22, 139–­49; marginalization of intellectuals, 53–­74; missionaries in colonial period, 23–­52; translation as epistemicide in, 3–­22 Latinx, Latinxs, US-­based: Latinx interpreters and the war on terror, 20, 75–­77, 95–­106; Latinx/Chicanx performance artists, 112–­13, 119–­20; Latinx queer theorists, 22, 139–­49 León-­Portilla, Miguel, 26n3, 29, 32, 36n8 LGBTQ+ and translation, 7, 22, 112, 119, 126, 137–­45 Ligiéro, Zeca, 120–­22, 126, 135 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 8n2 Lugones, María: active subject, 144; colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15; plurality of worlds, 10, 155; translator of Rodolfo Kusch, 157–­59; women of color feminisms, 142 Martínez, Ernesto, 22, 139, 142–­44, 147–­ 49, 155 Martins, Leda Maria, on translating performance, 123–­24 Mbembe, Achille, on translating Blackness, 17 Mehanna, Tarek, criminalizing the translator, 14–­15; treated as terrorist as form of epistemicide, 21, 77–­87, 103–­5, 155 mestizo/mestizx: “Anguish of the Mestizo Between Quechua and Spanish,” essay by José María Arguedas, 20, 52, 53–­66, 71–­74; between two worlds, 8, 20, 28, 46, 50, 52, 55–­66, 71–­74; mestizo intellectuals, 29, 46, 53–­74; note on usage, 8n3; royalty, 8; using linguistic tools foisted upon the Spaniards, 28

method: Arguedas’s, 12, 20, 52, 155, 53–­ 74; colonial missionaries’ philology, 23–­46; decolonial, 3, 12, 19–­22, 46–­74, 108, 137–­49, 153–­61; legal strategy in terrorist trial, 82–­86; “multiple consciousness as jurisprudential method” (Mari Matsuda), 86–­87; Sahagún’s, 31–­33; stereoscopic, 21–­22, 137–­49, 154; translation as refraction, 11–­19; Yousry’s method of legal interpreting, 92–­93 Mexica, 7, 45, 116 Mexico: Cabeza de Vaca and Indigenous people in, 152–­53; in the colonial period, 5, 25–­26, 29–­32, 36, 40, 41; criminalization of undocumented Mexicans, 95–­103; performance studies in, 116, 122–­23; queer masculinity, 142–­44 missionaries and translation, 4–­6, 8, 20, 23–­52 modernity: Arguedas wrestling with, 53, 57, 62, 65–­66, 72–­74; “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 127; as linked to colonialism, 3, 9–­10, 13, 15; colonial/modern gender system, 10, 13, 15; decolonial methods, 148; emergence of race, 33–­36; maintenance of racial state, 105; modernity/coloniality group, 56, 108; performance studies, 131; subaltern response to, 53–­74; and terrorism, 80; translators giving shape to, 10; trans-­ modern “replies,” 56–­57, 74 Muslims. See Islam Nahua (people), 7, 25, 26, 28–­32, 36n8, 40–­41 Nahuatl (language), bilingual dictionaries, 5, 9, 23, 25, 28–­32, 36, 40–­41, 45; olin and performance, 116 Nebrija, Antonio de, 4 Olmos, Andrés de, 30, 34, 36, 40 Ortiz, Fernando, 9, 116. See also transculturation

188 INDEX

pachacuti (pachakuti), 40–­41 pachamama, 46, 49 performance, translating, 14–­15, 21, 107–­ 36, 161 performance studies, and imperialism in Latin America, 14–­15, 21, 107–­36, 161 performative, translation as, 70, 143, 144 Peru: colonial legacies of linguistic conflict, 55, 57–­66; missionaries and, 5, 20, 24–­25, 36, 37, 43. See also Arguedas, José María; Aymara; Quechua (people); Quechua (language) Popol Vuh, 28 Portuguese, 14, 145–­7; and epistemicide, 18–­19, 109; translating performance into, 114–­15, 118, 120–­22, 123–­29, 135 Postville, Iowa, immigration raid, 95–­103 pseudo-­untranslatable words, 14–­15, 79–­ 87, 110–­36, 156–­61 Quechua (language), 5–­6, 23–­25, 28–­29, 36, 43, 45, 46; Arguedas’s use of, 55, 57–­75; hybridity, 9; incommensurate with Western languages, 20, 42–­52; no equivalent for European concepts, 14. See also Quechua (people) Quechua (people), 5, 6–­7, 24–­25, 28, 43, 46, 57–­58; mestizxs caught in-­between, 53–­74; worldview and thinking, 58–­65 queer theory, 22, 139–­49; performance, 119, 126; translating terminology, 6, 126 queer translation theory: performance, 119, 126; queer theorizing, 22, 139–­49; translating terminology, 6, 126 Quijano, Aníbal, 10, 35, 58 quipu, 45 race: colonialism and racism, 10, 13, 15, 33–­36, 106; critical race and performance studies, 119; decolonial translation in, 150–­61; and epistemicide, 13; imperialism, 33–­36, 77–­78,

80, 104; Latinx queer activists, 119–­21, 138; mestizos/xs, 20, 52, 53–­66, 71–­74; racialization of Islam, 77–­80; racialization of language, 6, 13, 33–­36, 59–­60; racialized state, 86–­87, 97, 100, 103–­6; racializing Indigenous people in the colonial period, 33–­36; racism in performance studies, 112–­ 13; translating Black struggle, 16–­17, 84; translating racialized terminology, 16–­17; and the war on terror, 77–­106. See also, mestizo/x; Indigeneity; Indigenous nations Rama, Ángel, 9, 58, 63, 116. See also transculturation Reconquista, the, 6, 35, 44, 78 Relación de los naufragios (Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca), 150–­54 Relation (Édouard Glissant), 159–­60 Rivera-­Cusicanqui, Silvia, 107–­8, 117 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 5, 25–­26, 29–­32, 36, 40, 41 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa: all cultures are incomplete, 73; biopiracy as epistemicide, 107; epistemicide, 3, 107; metonymic reason, 53, 66–­67; translation in social movements, 137–­38, 149; against “waste” of knowledge, 74 Santos, Rick, decolonial interpreting, 22, 139–­42, 145–­49, 155 sentipensar, 46, 158, 160 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 6, 34 “simple communicators,” Indigenous people as, (Gabriela Veronelli), 6, 33 social movements, translation and, 8, 17, 108, 127–­28, 137–­38, 149, 156–­57 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. See Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Spain, 4–­6, 8–­10, 78, 150–­51; conquistadores, 5, 44–­45, 150–­54; Castilian imagination, 43; Spanish missionaries, 4–­9, 23–­52, 116

INDEX 189

Spanish (language): Arguedas and, 55, 57–­ 66, 71–­74; and bilingual dictionaries, 4–­7, 9, 23–­52; Cabeza de Vaca, chronicle of, 151–­54; and decolonial translation, 153–­61; joto theorizing, 138, 142–­44; Nebrija and the first grammar book, 4; and relation to Indigenous languages, 4–­7, 9, 20, 23–­52, 55, 57–­66, 72; translating for undocumented people, 95–­104; untranslatability of “performance” 113–­29 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 15, 42 stereoscopic readings, 21–­22, 137–­49, 154 Stó:lō, 46–­47, 49–­50 Taíno, 8, 9 “Task of the Translator,” (Walter Benjamin), 55, 59–­71, 73–­74 Taylor, Diana, 14, 110, 114–­36 Tenochtitlan, 30 terrorism: translation as “material support for” 3, 4, 14, 19–­21, 75, 76, 82, 86–­87, 89, 106; war on, 3, 4n1, 14, 19, 20–­21, 75–­106 transculturation (transculturación), 9–­10, 17, 28, 30, 41, 58, 116, 135 translation: Aymara, 5, 20, 23, 25, 32–­34, 36–­41, 51; in colonial period, 23–­ 52; decolonial translation in, 53–­74, 137–­61; English, 18–­19, 46, 55, 95–­103, 145–­48; as epistemicide, 3–­22; French and colonialism, 4, 8, 13, 14, 16–­17, 56, 66, 109; as “material support for terrorism” 75–­77, 82, 86–­87, 89, 106; mestizxs translating themselves (Arguedas), 12, 20, 53–­74; Nahuatl, 5, 9, 23, 25, 28–­32, 36, 40–­41, 45; and performance studies, 14–­15, 107–­36; Portuguese, 14, 114–­15, 118, 120–­22, 123–­29, 135, 145–­47; at a protest, 145–­ 48; Quechua, 5, 14, 23–­25, 28–­29, 36, 42–­52, 55, 57–­75; queer terminology,

6, 126; racialized terminology, 16–­17; translating América into English, 157–­59; translating jihad into English, 14–­15, 75, 79–­87; translating for undocumented workers, 21, 77, 79, 95–­103; and the war on terror, 75–­106 translators: as cannibalistic (Campos Brothers), 127; colonial-­era, 23–­52; criminalized or framed as terrorist, 20–­21, 75–­94, 103–­6; decolonial, 138–­ 49, 153–­61; facilitating epistemicide, 19; ideologies that guide them, 11, 14–­17, 56–­67, 75–­94, 138–­49; Indigenous, 28, 31–­32; mestizx, 56–­67, 71–­74, 155; subaltern, 3–­4, 7–­9, 16–­17, 56–­67, 71–­74, 75–­94, 103–­6, 138–­49, 153–­61; “Task of the Translator,” (Walter Benjamin), 55, 59–­71, 73–­74. See also translation trans-­modern replies, 56; Arguedas’s work as, 57, 66, 74 Tropicália (Brazilian movement), 127 undocumented workers, translating for, 21, 77, 79, 95–­103 untranslatability, 14–­15, 79–­87, 110–­36, 156–­61 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 95–­103 Veloso, Caetano, 127 Vilca, Mario, 20, 47–­50 Vocabularios, role in colonization, 5–­6, 11, 20, 23–­47, 50–­51, 65, 137, 161 war on terror, 3, 4n1, 14, 19, 20–­21, 75–­106 world social forum, translation at, 137, 149 Wynter, Sylvia, on coloniality, 8; colonialism, 26; decolonial feminism, 142; emergence of race, 34n6 Yousry, Mohamed, jailed interpreter, 21, 77, 87–­94, 103–­5

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joshua M. Price is a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is affiliated with various translation programs, including the Translation Research and Instruction Program at Binghamton University. He has collaborated in translating two books of Latin American philosophy, Heidegger’s Shadow by José Pablo Feinmann (with María Constanza Guzmán) and Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América by Rodolfo Kusch (with María Lugones). His writing on translation has appeared in a number of edited volumes and in the journals Target, Translation Perspectives, TTR, Mutatis Mutandis, and others. He writes on race, gender, language, colonization, and structural violence. His most recent book is Prison and Social Death.