TY - JOUR
AU1 - Kato, Daniela
AB - These are dizzying times of expansion for the environmental humanities, with the ongoing emergence of disciplinary intersections across and beyond the humanities, and of collaborations across and beyond the academy in a variety of transnational and transmedia configurations. According to Ursula Heise in her introduction to The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), these changes mark a crucial inversion of the hitherto prevalent understanding of environmental knowledges as fundamentally techno-scientific; the environmental humanities, by contrast, underscore the shaping force that cultural difference, divergent histories, epistemologies, and ethical frameworks exert over scientific understanding and technological problem-solving. And yet there is still little awareness among environmental humanists that at the heart of all these reconfigurations are key questions of translation. The exception has been the work of anthropologists such as Anna Tsing and Shiho Satsuka, who consistently highlight the role that translation plays in the production and reception of knowledge about nature and, more specifically, in the mediation of human and nonhuman worlds as well as of scientific and vernacular knowledges across different cultural and epistemological traditions. Compelling as these approaches are in their countering of human exceptionalism and Western-centric perspectives, they hinge on an extended notion of cultural translation—“the drawing of one world-making project into another,” to quote Tsing’s definition in The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton UP, 2015)—that deflects attention from language politics and is therefore not always helpful to scholars and practitioners of the language arts. Indeed, despite their underlying environmentalist concerns, the border between ecocritical literary-linguistic studies and anthropology-based ethnographic studies remains a sturdy one in terms of their distinct rhetorical strategies, modes of analysis, and audiences. Michael Cronin’s Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene provides a much-needed conceptual framework for considering issues of environmental justice and forms of creative resistance to capitalist environmental degradation from within a multi-perspectival translation studies approach. By proposing the concept of eco-translation as “all forms of translation thinking and practice that knowingly engage with the challenges of human-induced environmental change,” he sets out to challenge the anthropocentric assumptions that have informed this field of enquiry and to resituate translation and translators as an integral part of a larger physical and living world (2). For Cronin, facing the translational consequences of the Anthropocene means not only that scholars and practitioners of translation need to engage with vital environmental issues such as food and energy security, climate justice and biodiversity loss, linguicide and global monocultures, and with the array of disciplines that study them; it also means bringing under scrutiny the dominant ways of thinking about the translator’s agency and social responsibility, the complicity of translation with regimes of extractivism and consumerism in our digital age of mindless mass production of translated language, as well as the environmental impact of data expansion and storage that such production entails. No less importantly, it also means mobilizing translational resources to construct new forms of transversal subjectivity with a view to investigating intersemiotic translation between radically different forms of species communication. Cronin’s book is divided into four distinct parts, reflecting what he singles out as key areas of concern for eco-translational intervention: food, interspecies communication, travel writing, and technology. From the pursuit of all these concerns Cronin hopes there will emerge a post-human ecology of translation with far-reaching political implications across multiple fields of activity and scholarly enquiry—ranging from more effective collaborations between local translators and global rescue teams in large-scale environmental disasters to the preservation of linguistic, ontological, and epistemological diversity in global cultures; from the development of green translation technologies to a wholesale transdisciplinary reorganization of knowledge around environmental concerns. I anticipate exciting developments in the direction of gender, feminist, and postcolonial concerns in ecologically inflected translational contexts—aspects that Cronin does not cover explicitly in his study. The ever-expanding transdisciplinary matrix of the environmental humanities has much to gain from incorporating the insights and approaches of this emergent field that envisions the constant regeneration of materials, peoples, life-forms, and ideas through complex processes of translation as “the ultimate form of resistance to the extractivist lockdown of toxic uniformity” (153). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. By Michael Cronin
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy015
DA - 2017-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/eco-translation-translation-and-ecology-in-the-age-of-the-anthropocene-HnFk0v2Y3V
SP - 827
EP - 829
VL - 24
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -