1st Edition
Creating New Languages of Resistance Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence
Omid Tofighian has been engaged in collaborative philosophical, artistic and political work with displaced, exiled and incarcerated peoples for twenty-five years. These interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations include co-authoring different genres of writing in English; co-creation and translation into English; and shared intellectual and artistic projects. The most notable example is his translation and collaboration in Behrouz Boochani’s award winning book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).
Creating New Languages of Resistance is an intellectual and personal reflection on creative resistance; it addresses critical issues pertaining to epistemic injustice, kyriarchy and border violence. Incorporating scholarship, different literary genres, exclusive interviews, media articles and notes on translation, this rigorous and accessible study examines the ‘shared philosophical activity’ Tofighian participates in with different collaborators. It suggests experimental and collaborative ways for producing and analysing similar texts and cultural productions; creates new spaces and frameworks for thinking about displacement and exile; and raises compelling questions and issues for people interested in researching and working to end border violence, bordering and intersectional discrimination.
Presenting a special rationale and philosophical vision about collaboration and co-creation in extreme situations, this is key reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in critical and cultural border studies, translation studies, public philosophy, literatures of resistance, coloniality and decoloniality, identity and positionality.
Introduction: Translation practice and public philosophy/creative resistance and collective knowledge
A shared philosophical activity and the potential for public philosophy
Translation as political and philosophical rendering: new languages of resistance vs kyriocentric language
The border-industrial complex: the refugee industry and pro-refugee/anti-refugee disposition
The two islands thought experiment
1. Translation as Resistance: Creating New Languages Through Collaboration
Stories of translation plans, processes and products
Crossing borders and arriving at translation
Representing and translating carceral-border narratives
Appendix to Chapter 1
2. Translation and Public Philosophy: Foundations for New Knowledges
Creative resistance from inside the prison camps: the role of collaborators and translators
Damaging narratives, damaging tropes/New narratives, new languages
Appendix to Chapter 2
3. Collaboration, Activism, Translation and Storytelling: Revisiting the 23-Day Siege on Manus Prison
Collective Knowledge and Resisting Border Violence
Translating interweaving narratives, combining diverse creations
Personal communication and reception within the siege narrative
Epistolic networks and legacies: writing and translating letters about a tragedy
The final visit to Manus Prison
Appendix 1 to Chapter 3
Appendix 2 to Chapter 3
4. Translation, Public Philosophy and Creative Work
Translation and knowledge production: knowing border violence
Translation and experimentation
The reception to No Friend but the Mountains
Appendix to Chapter 4
5. Border-Industrial Complex
Storytelling, cultural memory and experimentation
Synecdoche: Part/Whole Relationships of Border Violence
Identifying kyriarchy, exposing the kyriarchal system
Appendix to Chapter 5
Conclusion: More Translator’s Reflections
Biography
Omid Tofighian is an Associate Lecturer at Central Queensland University, Australia. His publications include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (2016) and translation of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).
"It is rare that a book emerges that generates a distinctive approach to a topic that has consistently piqued the interest of scholars, academics and the professions." - Linda Briskman, Western Sydney University
"Compellingly written, unflinching and inspiring, this book is the product of Tofighian’s reflective translation practice, scholarly expertise, and relentless commitment to co-creating a more just society." - Emma Cunliffe, University of British Columbia
"Translation has at once a colonial history and an emancipatory potential. Omid Tofighian’s translation practice is everywhere engaged in stretching toward the latter." - Michael R. Griffiths, University of Wollongong
"In this truly intellectual and illuminating endeavour, Tofighian’s ‘voice’ is present as much as his profound and engaging scholarly knowledge. And this is simply brilliant." - Sajad Kabgani, Deakin University
"I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in the atrocities caused by Australia’s border violence." - Jyhene Kebsi, Macquarie University
"Tofighian's vision for a collaborative public philosophy is exciting, radical, and clear." - Bri Lee, award-winning author, academic, and activist
"Tofighian’s book is a wide-ranging and well-timed intervention, written in a very skilful and accessible prose." - Ali Mirsepassi, New York University
"An incisive and deeply moving interrogation of Australia's brutal border-industrial complex. We have needed a new language to express the horrors of the carceral-border nation-state. Tofighian has given us one in this deeply humane book — that of the refugee." - Kristina Olsson, writer and member of Sisters Inside
"Centering co-creation and relationship-building, his work of translation reveals how he and his collaborators have innovated “new languages of resistance” out of necessity, breaking through not only the physical separation of camps and borders, but also the social imaginary saturated with dehumanizing representations of migrants." - A. Naomi Paik, author of Rightlessness: Testimony & Redress in US Prison Camps Since World War II
"Omid Tofighian offers a master class in intelligent, concerted activism. His work as a translator embraces the full extent of cultural translation, combing language transfer with facilitation, media change, adaptation, elaboration, explanation, political promotion, and interventions in public philosophy." - Anthony Pym, The University of Melbourne
"Here is an important contribution in a multilingual world in desperate need of more cultural bridges." - Hessom Razavi, eye surgeon, essayist and poet
"… the metaphilosophy running through Tofighian’s work is not individualistic or merely passive and academic, but a collaborative practice engaging exiled, incacerated, ‘illegal’ refugees riddled with cares and passions, pushing philosophy beyond the well-guarded borders of the profession towards unchartered territory promising new languages of creative resistance and alternate forms of knowledge production. This is the philosophy of the future." - N. N. Trakakis, Australian Catholic University
"This book takes forward Omid Tofighian’s existing work on new languages of creative resistance emerging from Australia’s carceral-border archipelago in the Pacific. It envisages a unique public philosophy emerging from this collective intellectual, artistic and political work, a shared philosophical activity that engages with the lived experience of those held in indefinite detention." - Gillian Whitlock, author of Refugee Lives in the Archives. A Pacific Imaginary
