In postcolonial contexts, translation is often conceptualized as a process of wrestling with the colonizer’s tongue, understood as a given, singular, hegemonic language. But what happens to (post)colonial translation when the colonizer’s tongue appears fragmented, heterogenous, ambiguous, or even silent? This panel explores translation theory and practice in colonial contexts that explode the conventional colonizer/colonized binary, such as conditions of semicolonialism, internal colonialism, and multiraciality. Such conditions yield translingual encounters paradoxically in moments when the idea of “foreign” is itself in crisis. The four papers (15 minutes each) revisit the notion of the “foreign tongue,” deconstructing both the “tongue” and its “foreignness” in understudied texts and contexts of Arabic, Chinese, English, and Persian. Presided over by Professor Paola Iovene, the panel offers new ways of interweaving translation studies and postcolonial studies by conversely unraveling both translation’s claims to equivalency and the coherence often attributed to arrangements of colonial power.

Anandi Rao’s paper, “Mapped Tongue: Deconstructing the Colonial Tongue in Translation Theory,” takes its title from “Migratory Glossitis” by the trans and two-spirit disabled queer femme poet, Amir Rabiyah. The poem brings together migratory glossitis (or mapped tongue) as a medical condition with the embodied experience of multiracial and multiethnic migrancy. The poem’s exploration of the tongue image sparks an interrogation into how “tongue” stands in for “language” in translation theory, a conflation that betrays gendered and colonial implications. Rao unpacks the terms “foreign” and “native” as associated with tongues in the work of European translation theorists such as Schleiermacher, Gansel, and Derrida. The paper then turns to Abdelfatah Kilito’s Arabic book, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, to uncover the potential of the “tongue” to both perpetrate and expose gendered, sexual, and colonial violence.

Extending Rao’s focus on the tongue as an image, Adhira Mangalagiri’s “The Semicolonial Condition and the Foreign Tongue” examines a Chinese short story, “Kumarajiva” 鸠摩罗什 (1929) by Shi Zhecun. “Kumarajiva” offers a fictionalized account of the eponymous Buddhist scholar (344-413 A.D.), a prolific historical translator of Buddhist texts. Shi depicts Kumarajiva’s tongue as a disembodied fragment, a symbol of both his translational prowess and failures. Set in the 5th century, this historical text stands out in Shi’s oeuvre, which otherwise largely explores Shanghai’s urban modernity of the 1920s, when multiple colonial powers exerted jurisdiction over parts of Shanghai. Although “Kumarajiva” may seem incongruous with Shi’s interest in the semicolonial metropolis, Mangalagiri shows how anxieties over semicolonialism and translation remain intimately linked. The paper offers a reading of “Kumarajiva” as a meditation on translation’s limits in a semicolonial landscape wherein the “foreign” appears – much like Kumarajiva’s tongue – in fragmented form.

Niloofar Sarlati delves deeper into how a fragmented “foreign” can shape translation. “Speculative Semicolonial Translations” turns to semicolonial Iran, a battleground where the British, French, and Russian empires competed during the nineteenth century. Sarlati reads pamphlets on economic, cultural, and linguistic modernization, underlining moments when translation functions to introduce “modern” ideas. She traces a particular translational practice wherein one Persian term is “translated” – or renamed – into another Persian term, based on speculations on how it would be translated into unparticular foreign languages. Given Iran’s semicoloniality, Persian at the time faced not one foreign language but several (French, English, and Russian). Examining this complex linguistic scene, Sarlati conceptualizes “speculative translations” as permitting imagination, speculation, and non-particularity in translation. “Speculative translations” opens space between “translatability” and “untranslatability” for practices of intralingual translations interpolated by speculative “foreign” languages, accommodating an ambiguous and fragmented idea of the “foreign” as a vehicle for delivering colonial modernity.

Expanding the category of “colonizer” beyond its European associations, Tze-Yin Teo turns to Xinjiang’s annexation by the contemporary Chinese state. “Does the Colonizer Speak? On Not Reading Linguistic Power” revisits Gayatri Spivak’s question about subaltern agency and occluded expression through a reading of Perhat Tursun’s absurdist Uyghur novel, The Backstreets. Teo considers how the novel’s narrative form, voice, and staging of translingual practice (between the Han settlers’ Mandarin and the protagonist’s Uyghur) points not only to the opacity of the state’s totalitarian and monolingual bureaucracy but furthermore to the difficulties of seeking to interpret its stonewalls. Teo argues for a shift in postcolonial translation toward narrations of the colonizer’s gestural power, which functions through emphatic and inexpressive silence. Narrating a break between speech and gesture promises a translational practice that dissociates the totalizing force of colonial power, asking finally if the colonizers ever had anything to say after all.