Translation And The Colonial Imaginary
Ibn Khaldûn Orientalist
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4871226 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Hannoum (0009-0007-8866-3114, Bard College at Simon's Rock, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 61-81 |
| Publication date | 2003-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1468-2303.00230 |
| OpenAlex | W1984093082 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 20 |
| References cited | 1 |
Despite the increasing interest in translation in the last two decades, there has been no investigation of the translation of historiography and its transformation from one language to another. This article takes as a case study the translation into French of Ibn Khaldûn, the fourteenth-century North African historian. It considers specifically the translation done by William de Slane in the context of the colonization of Algeria. The Histoire des Berbères, the French narrative of Ibn Khaldûn that relates to the history of Arabs and Berbers in the Maghreb, has become since then the source of French knowledge of North Africa. It is upon that French narrative that colonial and post-colonial historians have constructed their knowledge of North Africa, of Arabs, and of Berbers. The article shows how a portion of the writing of Ibn Khaldûn was translated and transformed in the process in such a way as to become a French narrative with colonial categories specific to the nineteenth century. Using a semiotic approach and analyzing both the French text and its original, the article shows how colonialism introduced what Castoriadis calls an "imaginary" by transforming local knowledge and converting it into colonial knowledge. In showing this the essay reveals that not only is translation not the transmission of a message from one language to another, it is indeed the production of a new text. For translation is itself the product of an imaginary, a creation-in Ricoeur's words, a "restructuring of semantic fields
Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · French · Historiography · Literature · Narrative · Orientalism · The Imaginary · African history and culture analysis · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender
Insights on the history of Anthropology
Kateb Yacine and the Ruins of the Present
Ibn Khaldun's influence on current international relations theory
Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddima , 1377
People of the Book
Modelling Foraging Cultures According to Nature? An Old and Unfortunately Forgotten Anthropological Discussion
The Andalusi origins of the Berbers
The Invention of the Maghreb
Isocrates and the paideia of the Lucanians
El legado historiográfico de Ibn Khaldūn en la discusión poscolonial
The Colonial Pasts of Medieval Texts in Northern Africa
Islamic philosophy and the globalization of science
Faut-Il Brûler L'Orientalisme
The ethnographic state
Guest Editor's Introduction
Khaldunian studies today
An emir in the ruins of Carthage
Translating the Past
Knowledge in Motion
The Historiographic State
| Unique citing works | 20 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,91 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2024 (21) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 18 |