Full Description
Omid Tofighian has been engaged in collaborative philosophical, artistic and political work with displaced, exiled and incarcerated peoples for 25 years. These interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations include co-authoring different genres of writing in English; co-creation and translation into English; and shared intellectual and artistic projects. The most notable example is his translation and collaboration in Behrouz Boochani's award winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).
Creating New Languages of Resistance is an intellectual and personal reflection on creative resistance; it addresses critical issues pertaining to epistemic injustice, kyriarchy and border violence. Incorporating scholarship, different literary genres, exclusive interviews, media articles and notes on translation, this rigorous and accessible study examines the 'shared philosophical activity' Tofighian participates in with different collaborators. It suggests experimental and collaborative ways for producing and analysing similar texts and cultural productions; creates new spaces and frameworks for thinking about displacement and exile; and raises compelling questions and issues for people interested in researching and working to end border violence, bordering and intersectional discrimination.
Presenting a special rationale and philosophical vision about collaboration and co-creation in extreme situations, this is key reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in critical and cultural border studies, translation studies, public philosophy, literatures of resistance, coloniality and decoloniality, identity and positionality.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Translation practice and public philosophy/ creative resistance and collective knowledge
A shared philosophical activity and the potential for public philosophy
Translation as political and philosophical rendering: new languages of resistance vs kyriocentric language
The border-industrial complex: the refugee industry and pro-refugee/anti-refugee disposition The two islands thought experiment
1. Translation as Resistance: Creating New Languages Through Collaboration
Stories of translation plans, processes and products
Crossing borders and arriving at translation
Representing and translating carceral-border narratives
Notes on translation
Appendix
2. Translation as Public Philosophy: Creating New Knowledges
Creative resistance from inside the prison camps: the role of collaborators and translators
Damaging narratives, damaging tropes/New narratives, new languages
Notes on translation
Appendix
3. Collaboration, Activism, Translation and Storytelling: Revisiting the 23-Day Siege on Manus Prison
Collective Knowledge and Resisting Border Violence
Translating interweaving narratives, combining diverse creations
Personal communication and reception within the siege narrative
Epistolic networks and legacies: writing and translating letters about a tragedy
The final visit to Manus Prison
Notes on translation
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
4. Translation, Public Philosophy and Creative Work
Translation and knowledge production: knowing border violence
Translation and experimentation
The reception to No Friend but the Mountains
Notes on translation
Appendix
5. Border-Industrial Complex
Storytelling, cultural memory and experimentation
Synecdoche: Part/Whole Relationships of Border Violence
Identifying kyriarchy, exposing the kyriarchal system
Notes on translation
Appendix
Conclusion: More translator's reflections
Index
