The Relocation of Culture

Reviews / Votes

The book successfully articulates translation as a vital principle of our cultural life and as an act of locating ourselves in the world by acknowledging at the same time the plurality of our languages and the complexities of our migratory processes. * Iperstoria * In this timely volume, Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani approach the relationship between translation and migration from an original perspective. Building on scholarship in translation studies, world literature and postcoloniality, they discuss translation as both a practice and an interpretative tool or mode of reading. Their examination of contemporary literary and artistic production from the US and the Mediterranean offers illuminating insights on translation as a 'border discipline' and also on the crucial role occupied by the global humanities within contemporary education. * Loredana Polezzi, Alfonse M. D'Amato Chair in Italian American and Italian Studies, Stony Brook University, USA * In this passionate and illuminating dialogue across continents, displacement is a haunting theme. The authors track the migration routes that scar today's globe, showing how these are also paths of language. * Sherry Simon, Distinguished University Research Professor, Concordia University, Canada, and author of Translation Sites: A Field Guide * The Relocation of Culture makes a bold and mature move at the border between languages and places. It hovers there, demonstrating that language itself is strange, precarious, even the "native" languages that seem natural to people who are unfriendly to migration. But Bertacco and Vallorani show that the nature of language is artifice; people on the move know that. It is available for translation, for new accents, and cohabitation with alternative codes. Nativist skeptics should brace themselves before reading; they are in for a certain change of heart. * Doris Sommer, Director of Cultural Agents Initiative, Harvard University, USA * Crossing a border often implies an existential risk, as migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere in the world know even too well. But it is also a potentially productive act, which relocates bodies and cultures. Employing the theoretical angle of translation, Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani work upon this productive dimension of border crossing and migration, both literally and metaphorically, foreshadowing the emergence of a vernacular cosmopolitanism. Working the boundaries of migration, translation, cultural, and postcolonial studies they open up new continents for research as well as for cultural and political activism. * Sandro Mezzadra, Professor, Universita di Bologna, Italy *