In this Book

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Borrowed Tongues is the first consistent attempt to apply the theoretical framework of translation studies in the analysis of self-representation in life writing by women in transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities. It focuses on linguistic and philosophical dimensions of translation, showing how the dominant language serves to articulate and reinforce social, cultural, political, and gender hierarchies.

Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial scholarship, this study examines Canadian and American examples of traditional autobiography, autoethnography, and experimental narrative. As a prolific and contradictory site of linguistic performance and cultural production, such texts challenge dominant assumptions about identity, difference, and agency.

Using the writing of authors such as Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Laura Goodman Salverson, and Akemi Kikumura, and focusing on discourses through which subject positions and identities are produced, the study argues that different concepts of language and translation correspond with particular constructions of subjectivity and attitudes to otherness. A nuanced analysis of intersectional differences reveals gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and diaspora as unstable categories of representation.
Literary Narratives: Mary Antin and Laura Goodman Salverson

Eva C. Karpinski

Chapter one looks at Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and Laura Goodman Salverson’s Confessions of an Immigrant Daughter as examples of modernist translation leaning toward assimilation. Yet under their surface rhetoric, both texts reveal complex resistant negotiations of identity, genealogy, and cultural memory.


2

Immigrant Crypt(auto)graphy: Akemi Kikumura and Apolonja Maria Kojder

Eva C. Karpinski

Working with autoethnographic texts by Akemi Kikumura and Apolonja Maria Kojder, chapter two explores the functions of translation in intergenerational exchange between immigrant mothers and daughters, whose bond can be described in terms of the economy of gift and debt, similar to the relationship between the original and translation.


3

Experimental Self-Translations: Eva Hoffman and Smaro Kamboureli

Eva C. Karpinski

Chapter three focuses on language-conscious, experimental,  and deconstructive narratives by Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation) and Smaro Kamboureli (in the second person), who both view translation with distrust. For Hoffman translation fails to capture the “essence” of the original while for Kamboureli it imposes a closure on the limitless process of linguistic proliferation.

4

Translation as Allegorical Metafiction: Marlene Nourbese Philip and Jamaica Kincaid

Eva C. Karpinski

The last chapter examines translation as allegorical metafiction in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. These postcolonial texts replace Eurocentric vertical models of translation as power imposition from above with horizontal  models of creolization and creative borrowing.


Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Contents
  2. p. vii
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  1. Introduction: Migrations of Theories: Autobiography and Translation
  2. pp. 1-40
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  1. 1. Literacy Narratives
  2. pp. 41-92
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  1. 2. Immigrant Crypto(auto)graphy
  2. pp. 93-128
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  1. 3. Experimental Self-Translations:
  2. pp. 129-172
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  1. 4. Translation as Allegorical Metafiction
  2. pp. 173-222
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  1. Conclusion
  2. pp. 223-228
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 229-244
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  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 245-262
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 263-274
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