Triangular Translation: Interpreting Nahdawi Literary Production on China
[Thesis]
Yang, Peiyu
Hartman, Michelle Laura
McGill University (Canada)
2019
229 p.
Ph.D.
McGill University (Canada)
2019
This dissertation examines late 19th- and early 20th-century Arabic literary texts on China to challenge the Eurocentric scholarly assumption that writers in the Nahda period drew their models of modernity solely from Europe. Surviving only in fragmented and unexplored archives, a large body of Nahdawi literature set in China offers a new stage for understanding the political and social discourses that constituted Arab modernity projects. While existing understandings of the Nahda have emphasized the emergence of sovereign nation-states modelled on European countries, the aspirations that emerge from Nahdawi novels, journalism, biographies, and theatre focused on China define modernity as a process of establishing transnational, south-south relations. Nahdawis wrote about China not by reading Chinese works directly, but by translating European Orientalist sources on China into Arabic. This circuit of textual exchange requires a new analytic for unpacking the multi-lingual layers of mediation involved in Arabic interest in China. This dissertation develops the concept of "triangular translation" as an analytic to explore these contours. By contrast to the standard paradigm that views translation as a bi-directional transaction between two languages, Nahdawi literary texts dealing with China retain a trace of at least three linguistic layers: the original Chinese, Orientalist renderings in European languages, and translation into Arabic. Triangular translation as a model allows for the exploration of the possibilities that these deep textual elements opened up for staging questions in Arabic about constitutional reform and gender equality through the language of ethnographic engagement with Chinese culture. Shifting the mastery of the western gaze away from the Arab world, triangular translation shows a way to analyze how Arab culture redeploys that gaze in relation to the rest of the world, for specific political and cultural purposes tied to the establishment of a transnational regional identity.