Postcolonial untranslatability: reading Achille Mbembe with Barbara Cassin

Barbara Cassin’s monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the “Untranslatable” (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe’s theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical “entanglements”, one of Mbembe’s key terms

The transnational lives and third space subjectivities of British Nigerian girls

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 on British Nigerian young women who have gone to boarding school in Nigeria and returned to attend university in the UK, I use the concept of third space as a heuristic device for understanding their transnational subjectivities and practices. I argue that, for some, this third space is a transgressive one in which they can craft alternative subjectivities and narratives about African culture and political economy. Applying insights from decolonial theory, I seek to build on the transgressive nature of this third space. In positioning themselves variously as Londoners, Nigerians, dual and post‐nationals, they express key features of contemporary transnational European subjectivities. Yet, parental expectations that they marry Nigerians and members of the Nigerian diaspora serve to reproduce the racial distinctions and nationalist rhetoric of colonial modernity that their third space subjectivities contest

Empathy’s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling

The concept of empathy has been set to work, across a range of fields, to mark a break with the relational patterns of apartheid. Similarly, empathy has been identified, historically, as that which, within apartheid and colonial rule more generally, exceeded or escaped relations of domination. This paper approaches the discourse of empathy from a different angle, taking empathy as a concept embedded in colonial thinking. Given that so many claims to empathy have had recourse to psychoanalysis, the paper focuses on empathy in Freud’s work, specifically Dora’s case and Freud’s analysis of Michelangelo’s Moses, which are read alongside the images and installations of contemporary South African artist, Nandipha Mntambo, in particular her collection of images and installations in The Encounter. Three scenes are conjured wherein empathy confronts its impossibility, but rather than foreclose on empathy as a postapartheid condition, it is through the disclosure of the aporias of empathy that it might be brought into the realm of the ethical through a practice of reinscription and through the figure of Echo

Contemporary African Cultural Productions

Understanding culture through rigorous research into cultural processes and products, as some of the chapters in this volume seek to do, as well as seeking to interrogate the representation of Africa by others and Africans, leads us in the direction of creating work that re-defines – doing so by decoding, re-coding and recording. The 2007 CODESRIA Annual Social Science Campus on the theme of Contemporary African Cultural Productions offered a critical space for dialogue among contemporary scholars of Culture and Cultural Production led by a highly distinguished convenor, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, who generously deployed his vast knowledge and experience to catalyse participants to question received wisdom and assumptions, and explore new directions in researching and understanding culture and development. He was also to skilfully guide the laureates of the Campus to rework their thoughts, culminating in this volume which, in many ways, is a first for CODESRIA and the community of scholars it represents. Without doubt, this book will both bring to a broader audience, the rich debate in which participants in the 2007 Campus partook and further extend discussions in new directions on the key subjects they covered. In the end, it will be the distinct merit of the book that it gives full meaning to the long-standing commitment by CODESRIA and scholars such as Mudimbe to the increased privileging of the production of holistic inter-disciplinary knowledge in which the social sciences not only speak more to one another, but also to the arts, humanities, and other sciences. Pinkie Mekgwe Adebayo Olukosh