Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt by Shaden M. Tageldin (review)

Disarming Words examines influential Egyptian literary works, historical accounts, and translation projects, following the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 and the British invasion of 1882, to demonstrate how colonial power hinges on cultural seduction more than military and economic domination. Tageldin argues that Edward Said understood cultural imperialism as secondary to political, military, and economic invasion, and that he perceived continuous resistances to this domination. What is most striking to Tageldin is not the resistance, but a process of largely inadvertent submission to European culture. It is this process, she argues, above all others, which enabled colonial domination. She develops a concept of “translational” exchange in which colonized Egyptians are lured by French, then British Orientalists and conquerors into imagining linguistic equivalence, cultural equality, respect, and even sovereignty. The tables seemingly turned, Tageldin argues that Egyptian intellectual elites imagined that European contact and influence would enable Arab–Islamic cultural revival. They “forgot” the stark realities of colonial domination, which cause cultural loss. Disarming Words explains how “translational” zones manufacture consent to colonial rule (to borrow Noam Chomsky’s term).

Disarming Words raises an important question about the role of culture and consent to the success of colonial occupation. Tageldin is right to point out that this has yet to be fully explained. Indeed, one reason has to do with method: more scholarly attention is paid to European colonial and Orientalist works than to how the colonized met with French and British culture, rhetoric, colonial designs, and invasions. In her study of the latter, we can think of Tageldin as part of a new generation of Saidian scholars that both draw on and diverge from the field as he largely created it. This new generation, often multilingual and bicultural, with insider and outsider perspectives, uniquely possesses the range necessary to tackle this task. Tageldin’s approach to reading colonial texts in the contact zone of translation, broadly conceived, is both solid and promising.

The book studies an impressive range of primary literary works, historical records, criticism, and theory in the original Arabic, English, and French, competently explaining relevant historical contexts throughout. Tageldin’s method is multidimensional, and she reads canonical Arabic works with French and English historical texts: al-Tahtawi’s Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Takhlis Bariz (Extracting Pure Gold to Render Paris), a chronicle of his official trip to Paris (published in 1834); al-Jabarti’s critique of Napoleon’s first proclamation to the Egyptian people; al-Attar’s rhymed prose fiction “Maqamat al-Faransis”; Ali Mubarak’s ‘Alam ed-Din (The World of Religion), a “novel in, of, and about translation” (160); Mohammad el-Siba’i’s Arabic translation project, particularly his translation of Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, read in tandem with writings by Thomas Macaulay and Lord Cromer; and contemporary works like Lawrence Durell’s Montolive (the third book of Alexandria Quartet) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqaq al-Midaq (Midaq Alley), to name most of the main ones. Tageldin devotes as much, if not more, critical space to discussions of scholarship and theory: scholarship by Timothy Mitchell, Wen-Chin Ouyang, Elliott Kolla, Rachid al-Enany, Sabry Hafez, Matti Musa, Samah Selim; critics who wrote about comparable geopolitical contexts (like Gauri Viswanathan, Naoki Sakai, Lidia Liu); translation theorists (Walter Benjamin, Lawrence Venuti); theorists of colonialism (Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak); and high theory and philosophy (Baudrillard, Hegel, Derrida, Bakhtin).

Disarming Words compellingly asserts that cultural consent and seduction are powerful, misunderstood forces that enable colonial rule. Both her approach and competence are impressive. There are, however, two interrelated difficulties readers may encounter. The first is the writing. Disarming Words is not simply another academic book with impossibly turgid, jargon-ridden prose. It is hard to imagine even scholars outside of Tageldin’s field, narrowly defined, who would be able or willing to push on through her dense, acrobatic analyses—let alone readers outside of academia. Many...