Going over the mail that arrived at my office during the lockdown, etc., and that I ended up receiving only quite recently. For example, past issues of the JAS. In vol. 79, no. 4, November 2020, interesting reflections by Gail Hershatter, Tamara Loos and Geeta Patel on the afterlives of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in Asian Studies. Followed by a wonderful reply by Butler herself–which includes an interesting personal reflection on translation:
Nearly thirty-one years after the publication of Gender Trouble, I no longer think of translation as a secondary act. In fact, the category of gender is unthinkable without translation. For too long, those working in Euro-American frameworks have assumed that whatever is said about gender is true if it is conceptually clear within those vocabularies and grammars. They have (we have) failed to note that gender itself is an English coinage, emerging in the 1950s, that does not always travel well, and which meets resistance for reasons that are not always suspect. If a theory of gender seeks to be generalizable, then it has to pass through translation. (…) There can be not theory of gender without translation, and translation is the condition for a global understanding of gender and a differentiated sense of gender studies. (…) A text like Gender Trouble has to lose its authority to still do any work in the world. Torn up and rightly plundered, it produces still, I hope, some parts that can be reappropriated for a use that I could not have imagined. This is perhaps the greatest gift, to find that what one has put into the world has a life of its own, enters the life of others and is thus given life in ways that could not have been imagined.