Radical Others in the New “Contact Zone”: Tensions, Breaks, Relations

Lisa Marchi

doi:10.12681/syn.16195

Abstract

Drawing from recent conceptualizations of translation as an open, fragmentary, and unpredictable process (Simon, 2006; Bassnett, 1998), in this article, I employ creolization as a theoretical paradigm of transnational significance to explore the ways in which Other cultures translate cultures, by paying particular attention to the breaks, tensions, and relations that these translations both reveal and produce. The essay examines and compares three creolized ‘texts’: the cycle of paintings “Changing Perceptions” (2005) by Arab-American visual artist Helen Zughaib; the collection breaking poems (2008) by Arab-American poet Suheir Hammad; and the libretto Imoinda or She Who Will Lose her Name (2008) by African-Caribbean-British writer Joan Anim-Addo. The main goal of the paper is to test the potential of creolization as a transnational poetics and practice and a theoretical tool to read and critically interrogate the creolized texts produced by today’s “signifying minorities” (Anim-Addo, 2009) within the British and US nations, and by extension within an increasingly interconnected, heterogeneous, and “uneven” (Radhakrishnan, 2003) world.

Highlights

America and its Studies.” PMLA 118.1 (January 2003): 9-24.Katz, Mark
As our shared teaching practice demonstrates, at present, creolized texts and classrooms, metropolises, and nations have become new zones of cultural contact, sites of potential intercultural relations and ruptures where other cultures link and mix linguistic and cultural strands to undo fixed binary oppositions and negotiate a more hospitable in-between space. This idea is confirmed by Simon who convincingly argues: “increasingly...we find that Western society as a whole has turned into an immense contact zone, where intercultural relations contribute to the internal life of all nations” (58)
Voices Within the Arab American Art Movement