Translocalities/Translocalidades

Sonia E. Alvarez, et al. (eds.) (2014) Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), ix + 483 pp. $86.23 hbk. $26.96 pbk. After many years of interdisciplinary collaboration, stretching across a variety of countries and institutions, the contributors to Translocalities/Translocalidades offer readers a vivid portrait of the ways that feminist discourse and practices travel across time and place to become interpretive paradigms for issues such as class, race, sexuality, migration, health, social movements, development, citizenship, politics and the circulation of texts and identities. The authors' concept of ‘translation’ is figurative, underscoring how feminist discourse and practices are politically embedded within the larger issues of globalisation and exchanges across disparate localities, particularly between women in Latin America and Latinas in the United States. The authors classify themselves as translocas, a term that embodies both the cross-disciplinary nature of their work and the movement of bodies, texts, capital and theories across borders. Throughout the collection, the various essays move beyond the standard dichotomy of us/them (common in many modernist modes of representation) to simultaneously serve as both self and other. The collection analyses the hemispheric politics of translation, emphasising the heterogeneity of Latinidades (Latin American identities) present among inhabitants of Latin America as well as Latinos living within the United States. The collection's individual chapters examine issues of Afro-Latin American women's movements and feminisms, indigenous women, Latina and US women of colour and coalitional politics – creating a sense of ‘intertwined diasporas’ that permeates throughout the volume (p. 7). As individuals physically move across borders, they also traverse non-physical realms that are both historically and culturally specific. The chapters are grouped into four sections. Before the first section, Claudia de Lima Costa contributes a comprehensive essay introducing prominent debates centred on translation and a theoretical backdrop for the essays that follow. The first section, ‘Mobilizations: Mobilizing Theories/Texts/Images’, analyses how actual texts, theories and authors have travelled and been translated. The section traces how this mobilisation affects the creation of feminist ideas throughout the Americas. The second section, ‘Mediations: National/Transnational Identities/Circuits’, explores the venues, circuits, institutions and agents that facilitate or obstruct the movement of feminist discourses and practices; some discourses and practices are privileged and shared, while others are silenced and ignored. ‘Migrations: Disrupting (B)orders’, the volume's third section, traces the translocalities and translations that have been enacted across bodies and borders; these translocalities and translations are gendered, sexualised, racialised and class-based. ‘Movements: Feminist/Social/Political/Postcolonial’, the fourth and final (as well as the longest) section, investigates how and why certain theories and discourses are successfully translated into the political and cultural practices of Latina and Latin American feminisms. As scholar–activists, the contributors to Translocalities/Translocalidades embody a keen understanding of the importance of feminist translations in the twenty-first century. As contributor Millie Thayer suggests, ‘In the hands of political actors, language is more than simply words, and translation must take account of the social practices linked to discourse’ (p. 403). These authors are more than itinerant subjects; they are necessary translators who straddle and transform languages and cultures. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, translation has emerged as a political act at the disposal of social movements – whether to disseminate knowledge and engender collaboration or disrupt dominant discourses to defend principles of autonomy and social justice. As earlier histories of subaltern cultures have shown, a failure to adequately engage feminist theory can homogenise views of these cultures and underplay power relations, as well as differences of sexuality, gender, race, class and age. Such homogenisation works to maintain dominant hierarchies, even among de-colonial subjects. Translocalities/Translocalidades is in every sense an interdisciplinary work. The authors span a variety of disparate disciplines, ranging from media studies to political science. Most of the volume's individual chapters are themselves interdisciplinary in nature and offer varied theoretical perspectives. Unlike some edited collections, that feature a number of essays loosely grouped around a principal theme, the essays in Translocalities/Translocalidades are truly in conversation with one another. This book serves as an excellent resource for any scholar or graduate student in the field of Latin American studies. The collection will leave readers with a fresh perspective regarding the Americas as a ‘transborder’ and ‘translocal’ cultural sphere and disrupt notions of a clearly defined geopolitical space that dominated much of the earlier scholarship on the movement of bodies and discourses across the region and into the United States

Citizenship · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law