Borrowed Tongues
eBook - PDF

Borrowed Tongues

Life Writing, Migration, and Translation

  1. 282 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Borrowed Tongues

Life Writing, Migration, and Translation

About this book

Borrowed Tongues is the first consistent attempt to apply the theoretical framework of translation studies in the analysis of self-representation in life writing by women in transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities. It focuses on linguistic and philosophical dimensions of translation, showing how the dominant language serves to articulate and reinforce social, cultural, political, and gender hierarchies.

Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial scholarship, this study examines Canadian and American examples of traditional autobiography, autoethnography, and experimental narrative. As a prolific and contradictory site of linguistic performance and cultural production, such texts challenge dominant assumptions about identity, difference, and agency.

Using the writing of authors such as Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, Laura Goodman Salverson, and Akemi Kikumura, and focusing on discourses through which subject positions and identities are produced, the study argues that different concepts of language and translation correspond with particular constructions of subjectivity and attitudes to otherness. A nuanced analysis of intersectional differences reveals gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and diaspora as unstable categories of representation.

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Yes, you can access Borrowed Tongues by Eva C. Karpinski in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Social Science Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Introduction: Migrations of Theories: Autobiography and Translation
  4. 1 Literacy Narratives: Mary Antin and Laura Goodman Salverson
  5. 2 Immigrant Crypto(auto)graphy: Akemi Kikumura and Apolonja Maria Kojder
  6. 3 Experimental Self-Translations: Eva Hoffman and Smaro Kamboureli
  7. 4 Translation as Allegorical Metafiction: Marlene Nourbese Philip and Jamaica Kincaid
  8. Conclusion
  9. Notes
  10. Works Cited
  11. Index