ROUTES: TRAVEL AND TRANSLATION by James Clifford


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Posted by Rainer Ganahl on August 27, 1997 at 08:26:13:

The next book for discussion is

James Clifford,
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century,
Harvard University Press 1997. (18.95 $)

From the cover:

In this collage of essays, meditations, 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 history proceeding from the fraught legacies of
exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion,immigration, labor mobility,
and tourism. Ranging from Highland 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 recognixze divergent histories, to sustain "postcolonial" and
"tribal" identities in contexts of domination and globalixzation.

Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes
away from home: these are transcultural 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 paths and negotiations,
leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles
and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation.

Please, participate in a discussion even
without having read the book as a new kind of reading

Korea 8/27/97


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