Translation and performance in an era of global asymmetries

Abstract

The articles in this special issue, and another that will follow in the next issue, arise from a three-year research project that brought together researchers and practitioners of theatre and performance from South Africa, India and the Netherlands to focus on translation and performance, particularly in a context of global power asymmetries and discontinuities. The project was generously funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa with additional funding from the University of Cape Town, the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis. The focus in the project was not so much translation in the linguistic sense, in which it is most commonly understood (although it did not ignore this aspect either). Rather, the focus was on translation in its root sense of ‘a carrying over’ across a much broader range of semiotic, sensory and inter-subjective forms and practices, including the conveying of gestures, styles, dramaturgy, and genres, moving across media, historical periods, cultural contexts and physical spaces. The field of translation studies has opened up in recent times broadly speaking ‘from textual to cultural translation, or from the translation of language to the translation of action’ (Bachmann-Medick 2009, p. 5). While Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘translational transnational’ in his book The Location of Culture (1994, p. 173) is an obvious, high profile and influential example, there have been a whole host of areas that have been investigated through the lens of translation since the turn of the millennium. A sample of these studies and areas would include migration as a form of translational action (Papastergiadis 2000); violence and translation (Das 2002); translating terror (Bassnett 2005); translation and conflict (Baker 2006). Our project took shape against the backdrop of two broad processes at work in the world that could be seen as both generally applicable to all contexts and specifically applicable to South Africa: globalization and post-apartheid. We would suggest that these two processes taken together could be described as forming one of the key social questions globally today. What has become known as globalization – the vast interconnection of peoples, economies, political processes with its intensive migratory and intercultural consequences – requires of us to engage in active and urgent ways with the challenge of being together rather than being kept apart or keeping ourselves apart. If the period we are living through in South Africa today is truly post-apartheid then in a very literal sense the project we must be engaged in is that which lies beyond separateness. It is the project of trying to ‘be together’. While this is obviously apparent in the South African context it is not limited to it. In the context of Europe, the recent resurgence of a racialized underpinning of national identity in different European societies alerts us both to the infinite translatability of the phenomenon of fascism as well as to the importance of a continual recalibration of translation towards the goals of a radical planetarity, rather than a narrow and aggressive, racially coded cultural determinism (Gilroy 2019). In India, alarming levels of socio-economic disparities