Cutting Together-Apart of English as a Second Language in Pakistan: Insights from a Translation Studies Classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses Karen Barad’s agential realism to re/world the English language as used in Pakistan. My arguments draw on my students’ term project where they not only ‘resist’ the ex-coloniser’s language by creatively adapting it while translating an Urdu text into English but make gender related and political statements. Using post/colonialism as a Baradian apparatus, I re/configure my students’ relationship with English in conjunction with concepts like Self/Other, linguabridity and appropriation. I suggest that it would be desirable for students to use English in a way that supports international communication, in addition to a local variety that gives form to their beliefs and values, their culture and experience. The re/creation of English in my class as a temporally entangled phenomenon - ‘a cut together apart-one move’- denotes the im/permanence and in/determinacy of the relationship which remains open to a new world of diffractive im/possibilities.