Translation at the checkpoint

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the contemporary theoretical and artistic landscape related to the material borders of state sovereignty. It opens by exploring Palestinian multimedia artist Khaled Jarrar’s At the Checkpoint (2007, 2009), an exhibition of photographs physically installed at the Howarra and Qalandia checkpoints in the West Bank. With reference to the aesthetic refunctioning in Jarrar’s work of such sites of control, the article draws a distinction between the “harder borders” that literary cartography often ignores in favour of the “soft, hospitable border” of flows, migrations and hybridity. Assessing Antoni Muntadas’s conceptual art projects On Translation: Warning (1999) and On Translation: Die Stadt (1999–2004), Claire Denis’s films Nenette et Boni (1996), Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004), and various Palestinian cultural texts, I argue that by foregrounding the laws of linguistic circulation and mobility, such works also inscribe the possibility of a multilingual, translational community beyond borders and checkpoints. I conclude, very much in the spirit of my book, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), that translation theory must pay closer attention to the linguistic checkpoints erected by states to maintain their sovereignty, and rethink translation as a counter-hegemonic practice.