Enacting a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation

Abstract

Our collective project on Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas explores how feminist discourses and practices travel across a variety of sites and directionalities to become interpretive paradigms to read/write issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, migration, health, social movements, citizenship, politics, and the circulation of identities and texts. Translation is politically and theoretically indispensable to forging feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial/postoccidentalist political alliances and epistemologies because the Latin/a Américas – as a transborder cultural formation rather than a territorially delimited one – must be understood as translocal in a dual sense. The first sense we will deploy – that of translocation – builds on but moves beyond US Third World feminist conceptions of the “politics of location.” Rather than “immigrating” and “assimilating,” moreover, many people in the Latin/a Américas increasingly move back and forth between localities, between historically situated and culturally specific, though increasingly porous, places, across multiple borders, and not just between nations (as implied in the term “transnational migration,” for instance). We therefore deploy the notion of translocal in a second sense, which we call translocalities/translocalidades, precisely to capture these multidirectional crossings and movements.