UC Irvine

Language, identity, conflict and their interactions are an indispensable part of our existence, and as such they bring the issue of translation to the fore. I examine translation—both as a theoretical concept and as a practice—through the lenses of gender and race. In doing so I offer a meta critique of the concept of translation as it is figured in multiple languages. Grounding a close reading of the texts I study in an analysis of their sociocultural and historical contexts, my dissertation “In the Name of Shakespeare: (En)Gendering India through Translation” lies at the intersections of translation studies, global Shakespeare studies, gender and sexuality studies and South Asian studies. I look at select Hindi translations and adaptations of Shakespearean plays in two distinct time periods (1878-1924 and 2014-present) to show how the myth of Shakespeare as a “universal genius” and the masculinist myth of India as a Hindu nation are co-constituted. I adopt a transnational and transregional approach to problematizing Eurocentric, particularly Anglophone, notions of translation by engaging with Anglophone, Francophone and Arabophone critical theorists.

While a wide range of scholarship has been published on global, worldwide and postcolonial Shakespeares, most of this work focuses on the performance history and traditions of translated and adapted plays. In contrast, my work pays careful and close attention to the ways in which the texts have been translated, and rather than considering the translated playscripts as secondary to the originals, I consider them as works of art in their own right. Translation is often overlooked and feminized in the fields of world literature and area-based literary studies. In foregrounding the racialized and gendered politics of translation via an analysis of literary and visual texts, my work seeks to bring translation out of the shadows, revealing it as a site of powerful political projects. Scholars who work on gender, sexuality and translation have brought to the fore the connections between translation and other “trans” categories like transnational and transgender. However, their theorization is based on Eurocentric models of gender and does not attend to the ways in which race complicates these theorizations of gender and sexuality. Because I bring the discourse on translation in conversation with critical race theory, my work also represents a significant contribution to the field of translation studies.