Translation Studies Commons^™

Fairy Tales In Service Of Political Projects: “Hansel And Gretel” In Changing Political Regimes, Polona Tratnik

Marvels & Tales

The production of fairy tales depends on political interests. The tales’ regimes of production and anticipated reception condition their inscribed ideological inclinations and erasures. I examine how Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Grimm contributed to nation-building and, focusing on “Hansel and Gretel,” how the changing regimes of production required omissions in the translations of the Grimms’ tales into Slovenian. I argue that the sui generis appropriation of the tale titled “Janko and Metka” by the writer France Bevk helped build a socialist nation. Finally, the article comments on some issues in capitalist regimes of fairy-tale production.

Pensar El Límite: El Símbolo Indígena En Los Proyectos Políticos Cubanos De Principios Del Siglo Xix, Jorge L. Camacho

The Coastal Review

This article investigates the way in which Cuban literature reflected on indigenous people during the early half of the nineteenth century and uses the symbol of the Amerindians to demonstrate a moral disjuncture between them and the colonizer. In this article, I call attention to the way Cuban independentists and Spanish nationalists used this figure to support their views and thus created a split in the Cuban creole imagination. I start by pointing out that these appropriations started at the end of the 18th century when historian José Martín Félix de Arrate, and poets such as Miguel González and Manuel …

Music, Politics, And Sociality: Ethnic Tensions And The Performance Of Gikuyu Nationalism, Peter Njagi Mwangi

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines how some selected Gikuyu popular music propagates ethnic tensions in Kenya by promoting Gikuyu nationalism at the expense of Kenyan nationalism. This music derives its themes from the historical period of the Mau Mau armed struggle against British colonists and connects this struggle with everyday experiences of the Gikuyu people. Memory and the performance of everyday life in this music solidifies the Gikuyu community as tied to a common destiny and distances other Kenyan communities from this destiny. The music consolidates Gikuyu ethnic nationalism and authenticates the position of the community as superior and a dominant force …

Specters Of Kurdish Nationalism: Governmentality And Counterinsurgent Translation In Turkey, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Publications and Research

This essay examines translations of the Kurdish epic poem Mem û Zîn into Turkish, tracing the logics behind these state-sponsored translations and examining how acts of translation are also efforts to regulate, translate, and erase Kurdish subjectivities. I argue that the state instrumentalizes Mem û Zîn’s potent nationalist currency in order to disarm present and future claims of Kurdish national autonomy. Using translation as a counterinsurgent governmental tool, the state attempts to domesticate Kurdish nationalist discourses even as it reproduces them, thereby transforming Kurdish nationalism into a specter of itself. Attending to this specter, however, allows us to see how …

Türk Edebiyatı Kanonu Ve Ulusal Kimliğin Sınırları (The Canon Of Turkish Literature And The Limits Of National Identity), Pelin Basci

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

The article is written in Turkish.

Written for the special issue of the journal Pasaj Edebiyat on the canon of Turkish literature, the article explores the relationship between the formation of the literary canon and the forging of the national identity. It argues that the modern canon of Turkish literature, much like other national literatures in the Balkans and the Middle East, has been politically constructed after the break with the Ottoman past. Turkish literature has been fashioned through a "literary exchange," much like the 1924 “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey, insulating and sanitizing it from other literary traditions …