History and Theory最新文献

This review essays situates Alain Corbin's Terra Incognita: A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries within current discussions of knowledge and ignorance related to intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge. These varying approaches have drawn the borderland between knowledge and ignorance divergently. After a brief critique of the Corbin's positivist approach in Terra Incognita, I sketch some well-known ground in the history of science over the past two generations. I then point to how recent discussions of the relationships between intellectual history, the history of science, and the history of knowledge have tended to sidestep that history. I conclude by suggesting how indigenous studies and Corbin's own previous work might serve to better entangle knowledge and ignorance in ways that might draw on the strengths of all three fields.

Building on the centrality of translation theory in literary studies, this essay makes the case for the utility of literature in understanding the experience of migration. Rather than assuming that this means narrative fiction or nonfiction, it explores arguments against narrative. Using frameworks developed by Maria Mäkelä, Hanna Meretoja, and Andrew Abbott, it argues that a story-critical, nonnarrative approach can better illuminate momentary experience and slow down the reader's rush to consume and oversimplify story features. Examples drawn from recent work by US Chicano poet-artist Juan Felipe Herrera illustrate some tactics that interrupt the flow of narrative, including the list, the assemblage, and the concrete space of the page.

Despite the global visibility of the migrant as a key figure in discussions of human rights, the contours of the migrant as a subject of rights still remain unspecified. However, global human rights fictions, which are often rooted in autobiographical and biographical accounts, offer alternative subjectivities by producing narrative forms that contrast with dominant “migration literatures.” Literature emerges as a contact zone where migrant voices engage with host cultures, facilitating dialogues that challenge stereotypes and reshape cultural imaginaries. In these spaces, language becomes the central medium to navigate and negotiate liminality. Processes of translation are the most obvious means of this negotiation, as translation bridges personal experience, political ideologies, and social imaginaries. By translating precarious migrant experiences into narratives, literature reconfigures the migrant as a central figure of human rights while also challenging dominant political discourses. Helon Habila's 2019 novel, Travelers, exemplifies these dynamics by mapping migrancy through a network of interconnected characters whose fates illuminate the complexity of migrant experiences and challenge received notions of migrancy. As individual narratives intersect and transform into a collective story, Travelers reflects the potential of literary contact zones to mediate cultural exchange and envision alternative migrant subjectivities. By moving beyond tropes of cultural clash and identity struggles, such narratives reimagine migration and its connection to human rights.

Drawing on an expanded concept of translation as process and practice, this contribution to the “Translation, Migration, Narrative” forum explores how migrants, as described by scholars such as Paul F. Bandia, embody “translated beings” who are marked both by agency and by constraint. We argue that translation serves as a literal and metaphorical framework for analyzing archives of migration by illuminating the interplay between migrants’ identities, their larger social networks, and the legal, cultural, and linguistic translations they enact and endure. The piece begins by developing theoretical insights from two works of literature: Valeria Luiselli's writings about her experiences as a volunteer interpreter for child migrants and Yuri Herrera's novels reflecting on migrancy as a form of evolving self-translation between languages and cultures. These literary perspectives on translation as an essential component of migrant experience emphasize the hybrid, translational experiences of migrants and the paradoxical, but also resilient, nature of their identities and agency. We then bring these theories to bear as methodology and analyze a 1954 document from the archives of South Africa's Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) that translated and transcribed Malawians’ messages to their mineworker family members in South Africa. We consider how the lived experience of “being in translation” was both common and differentiated between migrants and their “left-behind” family members. Ultimately, our intervention offers an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that bridges literature, history, and cultural analysis. This perspective not only underscores how translation practices are essential to the experience of migration but also helps to (re)constitute migration histories, in turn contributing to the archives and narratives that navigate the complex terrain of mobility, identity, and cultural mediation.

This essay examines how the concept of integration has been produced, translated, and institutionalized in Germany and the United States as a key element of policy frameworks that migranticize some people and, thus, translate them as outsiders. By combining conceptual history and translation theory, we analyze how the meaning of integration has evolved within academic and political discourse, tracing its emergence as a key category in migration governance. We argue that the production of what integration means can be read via and as translation, resulting in an ambiguous medium that structures access to belonging in a way that facilitates the reproduction of exclusionary hierarchies. We begin by outlining our theoretical framework, linking cultural translation with conceptual history to examine how integration operates as a dynamic but historically contingent concept. We then explore integration in Germany, tracing its genealogy from racializing notions during the Nazi years to its institutionalization as a migration policy in a multicultural society during the twenty-first century. Next, we turn our attention to the US, where integration remains undefined in official policy but is shaped through differential inclusion in the market and illegality. Focusing on Duldung and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, we argue that the German and US systems translate older forms of exclusion into contemporary governance structures. Far from a neutral or inclusive concept, integration becomes operative as a tool for regulating mobility and non/belonging through a twofold translation: the production of what integration means determines how the concept translates people.

This essay reflects on how changing practices and knowledge repertoires of Chinese migrant associations in the Americas shaped translocal collective spheres in the asymmetric setting known as the Exclusion Era. In order to achieve this, we highlight certain aspects and layers of what Homi K. Bhabha has called “cultural translation,” which, in our case, was advanced through the agency, ideas, and practices of individuals who organized in Chinese sworn brotherhoods, a type of mutual aid association that prioritized secrecy and actively managing knowledge dissemination. As historians, we argue that an interdisciplinary analysis of these processes enables us to trace the evolving ways that migrants translated themselves and were translated transculturally, how they permeated (intentionally and unintentionally) sociolinguistic barriers, and how they communicated information in public and in private. This enables us to gain a clearer picture of the frameworks for mutual support, (non)shared knowledge, and dynamics of translation in migrant collectivities, whose members displayed creative agency while operating within powerful constraints. This makes for an innovative scholarly contribution that resides at the intersection of translation studies, history, migration studies, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Appealing to history, rather than to God, to provide an ultimate judgment about human actions can have a justificatory or consolatory function. The former grants proleptic absolution for acts that may be morally dubious because of their benign consequences, while the latter enables victims in the present to gain a measure of relief by imagining they will be honored by posterity. In both cases, problematic assumptions about “history” and “judgment” call into question the belief that future generations will vindicate present-day struggles. The first of these assumptions is that “history” conveys worth by what might be called “victors’ justice,” in which success proves that the winner was morally superior. The second is that “history” is an impersonal process that can be recounted in a single metanarrative rather than an ongoing series of different narratives that are themselves variable depending on who is doing the narrating. When “history” means the community of historians who recount and analyze the past, there is rarely, if ever, a grand consensus agreed upon by all. Finally, whereas the judgment of God is assumed to be qualitative and individualized, and thus perfect for each case, human judgment depends either on deontological rules, which may not be universal, or on analogies that are only roughly equivalent. In either case, the judgment can never transcend the fallibilities of those doing the judging and approach the perfection of a divine Last Judgment. Perhaps the most plausible version of “history will judge” is the realization that we are judged in the present by the still admirable aspirations of the past, which have yet to be realized.