New Books in Language and Translation

Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India (Permanent Black, 2023) is a cultural history of western India from a fascinatingly new perspective: language use, writing practices, and relations of power. Its principal focus is the Modi script, a cursive form widely used for writing the Marathi language from the medieval era until quite recently. Examining the changing domains in which Modi flourished and declined over several centuries, Deshpande charts the interconnections of writing, script, language use, and structures of social and regional power in early-modern and modern South Asia. Positioning the career of this cursive form within a cluster of scripts, documents, and language practices, Scripts of Power tracks changing meanings within literate groups, bureaucratic power, and linguistic identity. It presents a critical genealogy of diverse power relations that produced the “regional vernaculars” of the Indian subcontinent – many of which, including Marathi, are official state languages in India today. Deshpande’s cultural history reveals multiple fractures in language at its sites of usage over time. It unsettles the notions of language as merely instrumental for communication, or as a primordial basis for identity, and makes us see language as history and practice. In deploying script as its entry point for large reflections on the relationship of politics with language, identity, and power, this book will fascinate and absorb all who are interested in Indian cultural history.Prachi Deshpande is Associate Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her research areas are language histories, cultures of documentation and multilinguality, historiography, and memory. She is the author of Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960 (Columbia University Press and Permanent Black, 2007), and has taught previously at, among other places, the University of California, Berkeley. She won the Infosys Prize for Humanities in 2020.Niharika Yadav is a postdoctoral fellow in South Asian History at Macalester College. Her research interests connect the histories of political and literary practices with studies of language, caste, and gender in postcolonial India, and on a broader scale, with global histories of democracy and socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Talking is a defining part of what makes us human – we are almost constantly in dialogue but what purpose does all this conversation serve? Both for the individual and for society. And what is happening in our brains when we do it? Shane O Mara has been thinking about those questions for his book, Talking Heads: the New Science of How Conversation Shapes our Worlds (Jonathan Cape, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. A Language for the World: The Standardization of Swahili (Ohio UP, 2022) pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard--a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes--negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili's standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa.The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

What does a map of Southeast Asia as a pegasus have to do with translation and Southeast Asia? How can we think of translation as anything other than a unidirectional practice of bringing meaning across languages? How can Southeast Asia challenge the way we think about translation? Phrae Chittiphalangsri and Vicente L. Rafael, the editors of the first edited volume on translation and Southeast Asia Of Archipelagos and Peninsulas unpack these questions that are raised in the book, along with sharing their personal stories about translation, with Kukasina Kubaha, a NIAS SUPRA alumni.Phrae Chittiphalangsri is an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Chulalongkorn University. She has written extensively on Orientalism, Translation, and Post-colonialism. She is also a literary translator working with Thai, English, and French.Vicente L. Rafael is a Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. His latest book The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte is published with Duke University Press like his previous books which include Contracting Colonialism, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues.Books and articles mentioned:On the Virtuality of Translation in OrientalismThe Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIASTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa.Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women.Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Jae DiBello Takeuchi's Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan (Mulitlingual Matters, 2023) examines dilemmas faced by second language (L2) Japanese speakers as a result of persistent challenges to their legitimacy as speakers of Japanese. Based on an ethnographic interview study with L2-Japanese speakers and their L1-Japanese-speaking friends, co-workers and significant others, the book examines ideologies linked to three core speech styles of Japanese – keigo or polite language, gendered language and regional dialects – to show how such ideologies impact L2-Japanese speakers. The author demonstrates that speaker legitimacy is often tenuous for L2 speakers and argues that, despite increasing numbers of Japanese-speaking foreign residents in Japan, native speaker bias remains a persistent issue for L2-Japanese speakers living and working in Japan. This book extends the discussion of native speaker bias beyond educational contexts, and in the process reveals tensions between how L2 speakers aspire to speak and how L1 speakers expect them to speak.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Noson Yanofsky, a professor at Brooklyn College and author of The Outer Limits of Reason, explores the boundaries of knowledge and understanding. He dives into what science and math reveal about the limits of reason, discussing paradoxes and problems computers can't solve. With intriguing examples, he illustrates how small changes can lead to significant consequences, highlighting our intuition's failings, especially in complex systems and quantum mechanics. Yanofsky uncovers patterns in the limitations of reasoning, bridging philosophy with scientific discoveries.

Anne Birkenhauer Molad, award-winning translator and teacher of literary translation, discusses the art of translation, the challenges of conveying cultural references and humor, staying up to date with language changes, the translation process and timeframe, and the lack of recognition and fair compensation for translators.

Today’s guest is Toril Moi, whose book Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 2017) returns to three twentieth-century figures in ordinary language philosophy to renew how we think about style and argumentation. Revolution of the Ordinary brings together a diverse archive of primary sources, from the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar to the 1970s TV show All in the Family.I am excited to welcome Toril to the podcast today. Toril is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Toril’s previous books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. She has served as Research Professor at Norway’s National Library for the last five years.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Amir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative questions from translation to audience reception using translation studies and theories of semiotics. The book addresses linguistic and pragmatic questions of translations, such as how text, gender, language, and lexicon can or cannot be translated into languages like English and what's lost in the process. To highlight the latter example, Sedaghat masterfully maps various translators' works over the years, such as Orientalist scholars (Arberry and Nicholson) to contemporary Rumi enthusiasts (Coleman Barks), to show how these various translations have resulted in negotiations informed by translators own particularities (i.e., beliefs, linguistic abilities, and social locations etc). The book further considers how Rumi’s poetry is also defined by kinetic and musical dimensions, which cannot be translated. What then are the ethical challenges to these paradoxes of untranslatability and reception politics of Rumi into the global west? This book will be of interest to any Rumi enthusiast, scholars of translation, linguistics, and semiotics, and mysticism, Sufism, Persian/Iranian Studies and much more.Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language