The decolonial significance of translation

The Centre for Indian Studies (CISA), will host this lecture by Souleyman Bachir Diagne from Columbia University.

In this lecture Diagne will discuss the decolonial significance of the simple act of translation, of “putting in touch” languages (Antoine Berman), in an ethical gesture of creating between them reciprocity and equivalence even in the fundamentally asymmetrical space of colonialism. He will first examine the role played, against the colonial order, and against the colonial “science of the others”, by European poets and artists who “put in touch” the language of their aesthetic quest and that of African artistic forms. I will then discuss the decolonial import of the literature born from the translation of African orature (considering the example of francophone West Africa) into European languages. 

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