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Article In: Translation Spaces: Online-First Articles

Cultural translation as infrastructural ethics

Heteroglossia, addressivity, and the unfinalisable self in Arab Anglophone fiction

ORCiD logo with link | United Arab Emirates University
ORCiD logo with link | United Arab Emirates University
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Abstract
This article reconceptualises translation as an embodied, ethical, and epistemological praxis rather than a neutral conduit, situating Arab Anglophone immigrant fiction as a privileged archive for such a reorientation. Reading Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan, and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home through a Bakhtinian lens of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the unfinalisable self, it theorises cultural translation as border thinking: iterative, non-teleological, and accountable to power. These novels feature translator protagonists who negotiate religious and secular epistemes, disciplinarity, and the affective economies of displacement, modelling selfhood as a dialogic, continually revisable construction across languages, genres, and institutions. The article presents an integrated framework — translation as survival entanglement, self-translation, and unfinalisability — that clarifies the micropolitics of legibility, the management of opacity, and the ethics of reception within transnational publics. Mobilising close reading of paratexts and codeswitching, it illustrates how these texts perform theoretical work: they transform translational practice into a method of world-making, reconfiguring belonging, authorship, and readability within the literary field. The analysis highlights micro practices — language, foodways, humour, ritual, citation — through which diasporic subjects construct enduring, albeit provisional, modes of living with difference.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Beyond fidelity: World making, heteroglossia, and unfinalisability
  • Survival entanglement: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator
  • The Self in Translation: Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan
  • Mapping the Unfinalisable Self: Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home
  • Cultural translation as infrastructural ethics: Conclusions
  • Author queries
  • References
References (34)
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