Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston's and Tan's Ghost Stories

Abstract

task of feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to workings of gendered agency. --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Politics of Translation has won substantial attention only in recent years when many scholars have discussed its relation to culture exchange, inequity between languages/cultures, and what role a translator may play in this complicated process of production. (1) As Sherry Simon puts it, the globalization of culture means that we all live in 'translated' (134). Ideas about cannot remain solely on linguistic or technical level anymore. Instead, studies involve a whole range of spaces and different media. As diasporic experiences and migrations continue to bring hybridity into host cultures, cable TV programs familiarize global audiences with forceful consumer culture, and post-modern media display power of transnational representations, all these messages demand to decode and produce meanings, making of differences. If we take gender issues into account, study of is more complex since there is a long history of most translators being women and being regarded as a feminized field. Compared to original text, translated text was normally considered inferior and secondary, which is similar to situation that a woman confronts in a patriarchal society. (2) In male-centered literary hierarchy, became a means for women to participate in literary activity. Thus, feminism and studies share some similar concerns about secondariness, about how canon is established, and about how differences are represented. In this article, I will examine concept of cultural translation in formulating a identity for those who struggle between two cultures and/or languages, in this case, two Chinese American women writers, and how ghosts exemplify their in-between situation. Ghosts are exorcised by writing and translating past to construct their future. (3) It is Homi Bhabha's notion that is a generative and creative activity. For Bhabha, the third is site where takes place and ensures that meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity (Location 37). intervention of third space makes structure of and reference an ambivalent process and can avoid trap of binary thinking and enable other positions to emerge. third space, or in-betweenness, opens up new possibilities to eschew oppositional thinking and offers a different strategy to defend against appropriation and interpellation of dominant hegemony. I found this point particularly fruitful in approaching these two Chinese American women writers. dehyphenated identity, Chinese American, takes place of neither/nor as well as of both/and at once. It is more like a third space in which they are caught in-between. As Bhabha suggests, the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of new as an insurgent act of translation (Location 7). In weaving old references from both Chinese and American backgrounds into their work, Tan and Kingston also bring newness and foreignness into wor(l)d. I would like to emphasize element of in their work. Egyptian scholar Samia Mehrez argues that this process of defamiliarization is one where language of Other comes to encode messages which are not readily decoded by monolingual reader whose referential world continues to exclude, ignore, and deny existence of other referential worlds that are crucial to a more global rather than colonialist, imperialist reading of text. …