Posted by rainer ganahl on August 26, 1997 at 05:18:09:
Subject: J.CLIFFORD, ROUTES: TRAVEL AND TRANSLATION
James, Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the late twentieth century, Cambridge,
London, 1997 (Harvard University Press, 18.95 $)
From the cover: +
.... a moving picutre of a world that doesn+t stand still, that reveals itself en route, in
the
airport lounge and the tourist parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the
museum.
In this collage of essays, meditatins, poems, and travel reports, Clifford takes travel and
its
difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates
a
world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global isory proceeding from the
fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor
mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Higland New Guinea to northern California, from
Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of
non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where
institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford+s concern is with
struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognizxe divergent histories, to sustain
+postcolonial+ and +tribal+ identities in contexts of dominatin and globalization.
Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home:
these are transculutral predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might
account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished
series of path and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and
agan
to the struggles and arts of cultural encoutner, the impossible, inescapable tasks of
translation.
Whith the discussion of this books and subjects the author addresses I would like to
continue this +READING SEMINAR+ and invite everybody to participate in a dialog
that
doesn+t necessarily have to be +academic+. Previous discussions can be looked up in the
archive