This research delivers a conceptual reconstruction of the trajectory of concepts used to mark qualitative differences among identities from the 16th to the 21st century in central Europe and the Americas. The surplus lies in the inclusion of colonial history in the genealogy of Western political thought and ideas, as well as in the postcolonial discussion of multiculturalism. The manuscript deals with the power and authority of translation providing the reader with an insight into the history of colonial racism through a deep conceptual analysis of three historical debates that have not been previously discussed together. By linking the so-called “Indian Question”, the “Jewish Question” and the multicultural question, this thesis includes a valuable critical revision of the origins of Humanism in colonial times and contexts and an original critique to the power and violence of language in ma(r)king differences, which is described in terms of translation.
This thesis was selected among the three best dissertations in critical social thinking of the year 2019 by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Author(s): Tania Mancheno
Publisher: Springer VS
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 246
City: Wiesbaden
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction: Intertwining Multiculturalism and Translation
2 Translation and Culture—in Five Currents of Thought
2.1 Translation Studies
2.2 Cultural Studies
2.3 Postcolonial Studies
2.4 Black Decolonial Studies
2.5 Critical Translation Studies
3 Translation as Method
3.1 Translation in Conceptual History
3.2 Koselleck on Concepts and Identities
3.3 Benjamin on Translatability
3.4 Benjamin on Fidelity
3.5 Fanon on Migration as Translation
3.6 Fanon on Untranslatability
4 Translation and the Question of Minorities
5 Translation: Moral Imperative or Colonial Question?
6 Translation in the Valladolid Debate
6.1 The Barbarian as a Hermeneutical Problem
6.2 The Indian Question: the Birth of Transcontinental Historiography
6.3 Translation in the Colonial Context: The Original Appropriation
6.4 Translating the Gentile into the Indian
6.5 The Valladolid Debate: Toleration and/as Cannibalism
6.6 Redefining the Difference’s Translatability
7 Translation and the Jewish Question
7.1 The Jewish Question in National Historiography
7.2 Translation in the National Context: Bauer and Marx
7.3 Translation as Emancipation
7.4 On the Translatability of Jewishness into National History
7.5 Redefining the Jewish Difference Through Orientalism
8 Translating Multiculturalism
8.1 Multiculturalism and the Migrating History of Minorities
8.2 Translation in the Multicultural Context: Kymlicka and Taylor
8.3 On the Translation From Indigenous into National Minorities
8.4 Multiculturalism as the New Public Virtue
8.5 The Muslim Difference in Multiculturalism
9 Conclusions
9.1 Historicizing Multiculturalism
9.2 The Politics of Translation in Multiculturalism
References
