Translation and Identity in Translingual/Transcultural Writing

What is it about?

This chapter takes its starting point from the observation that globalization has given rise to not only the oft-cited exponential increase in international migratory flows, but also a new polyphonic linguistic and literary reality. Contemporary societies – urban centres in particular – are being challenged by migration flows that introduce new cultural and linguistic diversity in previously more apparently homogeneous communities. The increased mobility of people has, in turn, given rise to an increasing interest in the ways in which geographic and linguistic mobility are connected and how patterns of mobility affect cultural orientations, sensibilities, and, consequentially, creative expressions. In the case of literary narratives, the fluctuation and intermingling of languages and cultures through their complex permeations has prompted a new engagement with the ways identity and otherness are constructed in relation to a ‘sense of place’ that merges global influences with localized place meanings. The discourse on “transnational identities” and cultural heterogeneity (Appadurai, 1996) is closely related to the language and translation strategies associated with the spatial displacement of people. The relationship between the transnational and the translational (Bhabha, 1994; Apter, 2001) highlights the centrality of language in a global world. As noted by Michael Cronin (2003: 6), in a world where “citizenship is seen as no longer exclusively defined by nationality or the nation-state, then any active sense of global citizenship must involve translation as a core element”. Similarly, when we negotiate the issues of translation, we are dealing with some of the same issues involved in negotiating “delocalized transnations”. This chapter examines recent polyphonic literary texts that focus on multi-ethnic urban scenarios in Italy. It is argued that the translational narrative practices used by these writers provide insight into the translational dynamics that contribute to global multilingual landscapes and that translingual/transcultural writers offer a dynamic depiction of the ‘transnationality of the global city’ in which decontextualised signs of traditions and origins are re-contextualised within an aesthetics of affirmation that embraces multiplicities of belonging –– linguistic, geographical, cultural.

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