scholarly journals Sociocultural and Linguistic Reflections on Post-colonial Studies of H.K. Bhabha

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01107
Author(s):  
Alexandra Milostivaya ◽  
Ekaterina Nazarenko ◽  
Irina Makhova ◽  
Armine Simonyan

The article is devoted to the socio-cultural and linguistic analysis of the postcolonial theory of H.K. Bhabha, who attempted to explain the colonial discourse, based on the concepts of “hybrid space” and “the phenomenon of mimicry” in his work “The Location of Culture” (1994). According to him, the colonial discourse is a complex, ambivalent and often contradictory process. The movement in time and space does not allow different identities become frozen in the unity of opposite. The difficulty lies in the exact definition of hybridity, understood as a boundary between the fixed identities. Particular attention is paid to the interpretation of the concept of translation of H.K. Bhabha, who believes that the translational process goes through some previously established boundaries and therefore puts them into question. H.K. Bhabha argues that the process of translation leads to hybridity codes and verbal propositions, actualizing their semantics in the socio-cultural situation of the target language. In addition, the focus of research interest of the authors got some lexical and grammatical features of the monograph “The Location of Culture” as a representative sample of the type of the humanitarian scientific style with a primarily cognitive-dominant.

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Novita Dewi

The interface of linguistics, literature, and culture was clear in translation. English Studies in Indonesia had undergone revision by the inclusion of postcolonial literature in its curriculum. Literary works from Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Sri Lanka, India and other Asian countries were introduced and translated. Given that language game was central in postcolonial writing, equitable knowledge and grasps of linguistics, literature, and culture were significant in translation. Through the lens of re-placing language as textual strategies in post-colonial writing, this paper explored the application of this reading method and gave practical examples of translating English poems written in, respectively, Singapore and Sri Lankan postcolonial contexts into Indonesian. The discussion showed that in order to preserve the postcolonial strategies of writing back to the colonial ideology, the translation took into account the reconceptualization and reconstruction of people, language, and culture, instead of literal rendering from the source language to the target language. Adoption of postcolonial theory as the translating method shown in this study is important to add to the theory and practice of translation. This trajectory can be used to translate other literary works written in varieties of English into Indonesian, using as they do, different translation strategies to make the translation products accurate, appropriate, and acceptable.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-114
Author(s):  
Mohammad Motamedi ◽  
Abdolbaqi Rezaei Talarposhti ◽  
Behzad Pourqarib

In 1980, an Indian critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak announced strategic essentialism as a major concept in postcolonial theory. It is a special form of essentialism which involves greater scopes of post-colonial studies such as subaltern, otherness, and strategic essentialism; this term can become meaningful in an imperialistic context where oppression and suppressions are as part of thecountry. With the increase of colonialism in nineteenth century and its consequences in twentieth century, which was almost the end of this era, many writers try to demonstrate it through literature. The mentioned concepts are traceable in countries which were experiencing the imperialism; then strategic essentialism helps the margins of society to find their true identity and by using it, they can survive. This paper is an attempt to represent essentialism and imperialism in Gabriel Garcia’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. The findings of this paper may affect those countries which are still under the pressure of colonialism. The major conclusion is that if inferiors of the society unite with each other, find their true identity and stand against oppressions, then they can get rid of the oppressions.


Author(s):  
Aleksandra Matulewska ◽  
Anne Wagner

Abstract Legal translation is a complex transfer of the text formulated in a source language into a target language which needs to take into account a wide array of factors to ensure the equality of parties to the process of interlingual communication. It is an autonomous realm of cross-cultural events within which the system-bound of legal concepts/notions deeply rooted in language, history and societal evolution of one country are transformed and integrated into the language of another, and as a result, stratified over the course of time (Mattila in Comparative legal linguistics, Routledge, Aldershot, 2006). That aspect of legal translation is called the Third Space (Bhabha in: Ashcroft B, Griffiths G, Tiffin H (eds) The post-colonial studies readers. Routledge New York, pp 206–209, 1995). The authors investigate some aspects of the Third Space including (1) Protean meanings and diverging legal cultures which are constantly remodeled, (2) cultural codes, and communication stereotypes as well as (3) communication problems stemming from stratification of communication in legal settings. The research methods applied include the semiotic analysis of legal translation strategies and potential loss of meaning.


Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (232) ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Gunnar Sandin

AbstractEvaluation of other cultures is a strong force in a culture’s definition of itself. Cultures are formed in encounters that include domination, conflict, and dismissal as much as appreciation and smooth exchange. In this paper, the construction of cultural identity is discussed, with reference to a Scandinavian Theme Park proposal made in cooperation between American design consultants and a local Swedish team of planners and visionaries. The image production in this design proposal, which never came to be realised in architectural production, shows that “Scandinavia” appears as a two-some dialogic construction that adopts stereotyped cultural identities, and that it was not brought to any wider public dialogue. In a semiotic account of this architectural decision-making, models of culture (Lotman. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: Tauris.) are discussed in terms of the tripartition of culture into Ego-culture, Alter-culture and Alius-culture (Sonesson. 2000. Ego meets alter: The meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128(3/4). 537–559.; Cabak Rédei, Anna. 2007. An inquiry into cultural semiotics: Germaine de Staël’s autobiographical travel accounts. Lund: Lund University Press.), considered as a basic abstracted backdrop of what is meant by cultural difference. In this paper it is suggested that this tripartite view on culture, can be further discussed in reflection of post-colonial studies, notably through terms such as “mimicry” (Bhabha. 1984. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28. 125–133.) and “subalterity” (Spivak. 1988. Can the subaltern speak?. In Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, 271–313. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.). The model of culture can furthermore be discussed through Peirce’s distinction between different stages and carriers of representation, adding to the cultural model an understanding of what it means, over time, for a culture to relate to an admired as well as to a neglected other cultural actor.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Richard Jorge

It is widely accepted that the relationships of dominance between the self and the other are concurrent to both the Gothic genre and postcolonial theory. In Gothic literature this relationship has traditionally been expressed through the dichotomy self vs. other, in which the self is the male protagonist while the latter is “everything else in that world” (Day 19), Gothic literature being, thus, an exploration of the formation of identity. In colonial Gothic this is brought under the axiom colonizer-colonized, and, therefore, characters are analysed as manifestations of a dichotomy which usually links first the other to the monstrous, who is subsequently presented as the colonized subject. The Irish case further complicates this simple binary relation. The running argument of the present paper is that far from being a dichotomy, the Irish case is better understood as a triangle in which two of its vertices are fixed—Catholics/Irish and English—while the third vertex, that of the Anglo-Irish, gradually shifts positions from the English to the Irish one, following a creolization process in which they are both victims and victimizers. The characters in the fictions of J.S. Le Fanu all epitomize this constrained relationship, displaying an array of roles who do not comfortably fit into either category, showing a pervading feeling of being ill-at-ease. As this paper shows, a deeper reading reveals these figures to be just the opposite of what the prototypical colonialist figure ought to be—weak and feeble, terrorized rather than terrorizer, in awe of the other instead of subduing it.


2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
Jana Šnytová

Summary In this paper, I focused on the translation work by František Benhart which, due to its extensiveness, was of crucial importance to the reception of Slovenian literature in the Czech cultural environment of the second half of the 20th century. The aim of this study is the linguistic analysis of the literary translations of selected literary works of the canon of Slovenian literature into Czech. Translation can be considered to be a cultural transposition, i. e. a transfer of the text and cultural environment from the source language into the text and cultural environment of the target language. In the analyses, I focused on some partial issues that either dominated in the particular text (expressivity, phraseology, idiomatic or proper names) or occurred across the texts analysed (realia) and in this context, I searched for his specific translation solutions. I also examined short excerpts of the original text and its translated counterpart looking for the presence of stylistically marked elements. Based on the results of individual analyses, I presented Benhart’s specific translation approaches and I attempted to summarize and indicate the basic features of his translation method. Furthermore, my second objective was to point out the possible consequences of Benhart’s translation method for the reception of the Slovenian literature in the Czech cultural environment.


Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.


2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riccardo Poli ◽  
Nicholas Freitag McPhee

This paper is the second part of a two-part paper which introduces a general schema theory for genetic programming (GP) with subtree-swapping crossover (Part I (Poli and McPhee, 2003)). Like other recent GP schema theory results, the theory gives an exact formulation (rather than a lower bound) for the expected number of instances of a schema at the next generation. The theory is based on a Cartesian node reference system, introduced in Part I, and on the notion of a variable-arity hyperschema, introduced here, which generalises previous definitions of a schema. The theory includes two main theorems describing the propagation of GP schemata: a microscopic and a macroscopic schema theorem. The microscopic version is applicable to crossover operators which replace a subtree in one parent with a subtree from the other parent to produce the offspring. Therefore, this theorem is applicable to Koza's GP crossover with and without uniform selection of the crossover points, as well as one-point crossover, size-fair crossover, strongly-typed GP crossover, context-preserving crossover and many others. The macroscopic version is applicable to crossover operators in which the probability of selecting any two crossover points in the parents depends only on the parents' size and shape. In the paper we provide examples, we show how the theory can be specialised to specific crossover operators and we illustrate how it can be used to derive other general results. These include an exact definition of effective fitness and a size-evolution equation for GP with subtree-swapping crossover.


1995 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
David Chioni Moore ◽  
Patrick Williams ◽  
Laura Chrisman ◽  
Bill Ashcroft ◽  
Gareth Griffiths ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.


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