Contextualising Migration: Perspectives from Literature, Culture and Translation (2025)

Migration, Translation and Identity: Crossroads of Language, Literature, and Professional Practice

Tertium Linguisitc Journal, 2024

Migration, translation, and identity are deeply interconnected because migration challenges individuals to navigate between languages, cultures and selves, much like translation negotiates between layers of meanings and loyalties. Both processes involve movement and transfer, loss and gain, transformation, and reinvention. Migration displaces people physically, but it also forces a translation of self: adapting to new cultural codes, reinterpreting one’s past, and negotiating belonging in an unfamiliar space.

'Everything is translatable, nothing is translatable’: the migrant as translated/translator in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

Angles:New Perspectives on the Anglophone World, 2022

A translation is always a process and never a simple one or a complete one. The task of the translator is to transpose meanings allowing distant worlds to make sense of each other but this always bears with itself a dimension of failure as nothing can be perfectly transposed from one language to another without losing or altering part of its meaning. If, as Salman Rushdie observes, from an etymological point of view to translate means to carry across, then the migrant is a ‘translated man’. The migrant’s translation implies physical, linguistic and cultural border-crossings that generate a process that shapes the migrant’s identity. This process is an act of sur-vival, both in the sense of living on the margins and in the sense of the migrant‘s dream for survival (Benjamin, Bhabha, Derrida, Rushdie). The paper proposes a reading of Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers that analyses how it represents the relationship between translation and the Pakistani migrants’ processes of identity construction.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF TRANSLATION AND MIGRATION

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Migration explores the practices and attitudes surrounding migration and translation, aiming to redefine these two terms in light of their intersections and connections. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, highlighting the broad scope of migration and translation as not only linguistic and geographical phenomena, but also cultural, social, artistic and psychological processes. The nexus between migration and translation, the central concern of this Handbook, challenges limited conceptualisations of identity and belonging, thereby also exposing the limitations of monolingual, monocultural models of nationhood. Through a diverse range of approaches and methodologies, individual chapters investigate specific historical circumstances and illustrate the need for an intersectional approach to questions of language access and language mediation. With its range of approaches and case studies, the volume highlights the inherently political nature of translation and its potential to shape social and cultural inclusion, emphasising the crucial role of language and translation in informing professional practices, institutional policies, educational approaches and community attitudes towards migration. By bringing together perspectives from both researchers and creative practitioners, this book makes an innovative contribution to ongoing global discussions on linguistic hospitality and diversity, ideal for those pursuing postgraduate and doctoral studies in translation studies, linguistics, international studies and cultural studies.

The Pain of Migration in Literature and Conflict of Identity

The Equanimist , 2022

The present paper discusses and analyses the identity conflict of the Indian Diaspora in different nations and its contribution to the making of both countries as reflected in literature. It seeks the various reasons why the people of the Indian Diaspora keep their Indian identity or the hyphenated identity with them even after migrating from India and the circumstances of that time of the nation in which they migrated. Suppose one migrates from one's country to settle permanently in another country. In that case, one can either accept and assimilate oneself with the country's culture or reject that and align oneself with that of one's root country or homeland. These (acceptance, assimilation, rejection of culture) depend upon the circumstances and situation of the nation and the behaviours and treatments of the natives of the land. When people immigrate to another country, they suffer from a crisis of identity. At the base of this crisis of identity lies the double consciousness.

Refugee in the Land of Redemption: Serial Migration as a Theme in Contemporary Fiction about South Asia

Contextualising Migration: Perspectives from Literature, Culture and Translation, 2022

Conceptualised at the conference organised in January 2020 titled “Contextualising Migration: Perspectives from Literature, Culture and Translation” by the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at GITAM, Hyderabad in collaboration with CIIL, the present volume aims to engage the emergent tendencies within the long histories of migration motivated by a renewed understanding of translated ideas and identities in the present order of world affairs. The volume also aims to trace the literary metamorphosis under the influence of the emerging transnational, transmedial world of literary exchange that has documented the complex negotiation of loss and recovery and methods of searching for one’s identity on one hand and on the other, made literature increasingly difficult to be tied down to one nation, one language. Consequently, the volume is divided into three interconnected sections. The first two sections are dedicated to account for the challenges thrown by the latest discourse and ...

Migration and Transnational Studies: Between Simultaneity and Rupture

(2013) In: A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, edited by Ato Qayson and Girish Daswani, Blackwell Publishing , pp. 106-124.

Languages of Exile: Migration and Multilingualism in Twentieth-Century Literature (ed.) (Intro)

Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically – at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other – in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration. The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.

Transatlantic translations as identity mediating discourses

‘Migration and Transnational Studies: Between Simultaneity and Rupture,’ in A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, (eds) Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Stuart Hall famously summed up the painful predicament of international migration as the dawning realization that one can never return home. 1 Overseas migration sets in motion a process of dislocation along with the encounter with new social environments and landscapes. Over time, these change migrants' consciousness, their intimate knowledge, and taken-for-granted expectations, while in their absence the countries and friends they left behind change too, often to the extent that on their return they find they are no longer in the same country. Describing himself as a "cosmopolitan by default," Hall (2008) reflects on the sense of loss, noting that "every diaspora has its regrets": Although you can never go back to the past, you do have a sense of loss. There is something you have lost. A kind of intimate connection with landscape, and family, and tradition, which you lose. I think this is the fate of modern people-we have to lose them, but [we believe] we are going to go back to them. (pp. 349-350) The sense of lost intimacy-the knowing of a place and all its taken-for-granted ways of thinking, interacting and "systems of relevancies"-was first theorized by Alfred Schütz in "The Homecomer" (1945), a foundational article on the sociology of everyday life: Home means one thing to the man who never has left it, another thing to the man who dwells far from it, and still another to him who returns. "To feel at home" is an A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, First Edition. Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani.

Intersectionality and Transnationalism: Critical Issues and Approaches in International Migration , 2022

The aftermath of a prolonged period in which xenophobia and racism have been significantly made visible, as well as escalated in and beyond the United States, has heightened attention to racialized im/migration. Despite the agency afforded to im/migrants by autonomy of migration perspectives, numerous im/migrants across the globe are daily racialized even while attempting to exercise self-determination in response to the many restrictions imposed by nation states during border-crossing. This continued dialectic in which im/migrants are racialized even as they are perceived as agentive, tends to be explained primarily based on racialization as a function of the 'post-migration' experience. Yet, racialization based on the nation state as well as the corresponding sense of agency or a lack thereof in the 'pre-migration' experience of many im/migrants is often overlooked. In this chapter, we situate our discussion at the impasse between racialized im/migration and autonomy of migration perspectives and argue that the afore-mentioned dynamic can be better understood and clarified in research on im/migration by equally attending to examinations of nation-state racialization as well as agency in the pre-migration experiences of im/migrants, as is often done with post-migration experiences. Specifically, we propose transnational literacies as a tool for nation states to identify and address how language functions as a proxy for systemic forms of racism against non-white im/migrants during the pre- and post-migration experience. We propose this also, for enabling racialized im/migrants to identify the implicit and explicit instances of racialization and corresponding agency in their home countries while juxtaposing these against the same in receiving countries. To do so, we rely on excerpts regarding pre- and post-migration from a previously published study of an adult of Afro-Caribbean descent. The basis for proposing transnational literacy as a tool in this regard is derived from the intersectionality of language and race whereby language functions as a key mechanism through which im/migrants experience racialization, both by and beyond the impositions of nation states, in their attempts to exercise agency during border-crossing. Drawing simultaneously from autonomy of migration and racialized im/migration perspectives, a raciolinguistic perspective and the Black immigrant literacies framework, we describe how transnational literacy makes visible the role of racialization, pre- and post-migration, from the microsystem to the chronosystem, providing nation states with insights concerning how non-white im/migrants might be better supported in rewriting agentive responses to the racialization of Black subjects.