Translingual Empowerment: Exophonic Women’s Writing in Catalan and Spanish
Citation:
Catherine Barbour, Translingual Empowerment: Exophonic Women’s Writing in Catalan and Spanish, Parallax, 2022, 28, 1Download Item:
Abstract:
On claiming that a language constitutes ‘the only country without borders’, German-Bosnian
writer Saša Stanišić taps into the multifaceted debates surrounding its role in literary
practice. Throughout history, the global movement and mixing of peoples, languages,
cultures and ideas has triggered diverse, innovative and experimental creativity. Translingual
writing, in which the writer adopts a second language, or moves between two or more named
languages in their work, is an example of such. National literatures, conceived of as
repositories of the nation since the consolidation of nation-states in the nineteenth century,
are conditioned and policed according to essentialist markers of linguistic, geo- and bio-
politics. Inclusion in literary traditions, termed literary ‘citizenship’ in a reflection of its
relation to national identity, has historically been barred from writers and texts that do not
adhere to stringent categorisation. Located across and between languages and cultures,
translingual texts resist this facile classification. Pointing to the plurilingualism inherent in
national cultures, they emit fluid, multifaceted, and conflicting transnational cultures and
identities that destabilise the bounded, monolingual parameters of the ‘imagined
communities’ identified by Benedict Anderson.
Author's Homepage:
http://people.tcd.ie/barbourc
Author: Barbour, Catherine
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Series/Report no:
Parallax;28;
1;
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