Professor Arvind Pal Mandair, University of Michigan
Complicating Contact Zones: Translation as Practice of Creating Concepts and Self-Differentiation
Date: September 2
Time: 12:00-13:00
Venue: F21, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ (http://www.ed.ac.uk/maps/maps?building=7-george-sq)
Abstract:
This presentation will address the modern encounter between India and the West, specifically by recounting aspects of the history of translation of Sikh sacred texts and its main socio-political effects in the colonial and postcolonial period. One major effect of such translation practices is that they helped to ‘convert’ South Asian peoples to modernity not only by (paradoxically) constructing Hindu/Sikh/Muslim traditions as ‘religions’, but more problematically by interdicting native concepts that resisted being exchanged for the signifier ‘religion’. The legacy of such translation practices and the interdictions it generated can be felt not only in the contemporary resurgences of religious nationalism in the subcontinent, but also in secular ‘multicultural’ democracies.
Bio-note:
Arvind Mandair teaches at the University of Michigan where he is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures and holder of the S.B.S.C. Endowed Chair in Sikh Studies. Broadly grounded in South Asian studies his research interests include comparative and continental philosophy, translation studies, postcolonial theory, secularism and the theoretical study of religion and violence. His book publications include Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation (Columbia University Press, 2009). He also edits the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory published by Routledge.