SUMMARY:

Nivedita Menon problematizes the vision of emancipation achieved via the translation of a unique sociocultural experience of an individual or a group into some universal discourse, as well as the very ideal of a single universal sphere of knowledge and culture. The politics of the direct and all-embracing translation of the unfamiliar into the familiar implies the act of symbolic (and sometimes physical) violence, even if it pursues the goal of liberation and accommodation of the Other. Far from defending particularism and autarky, Menon stresses the significance of fundamental heterogeneity of local languages of self-description, and of the public spaces where those languages develop and function. Criticizing the ideal of complete mutual intelligibility as utopian, and the prospects of self-isolationism as reactionary and unsustainable, she advances a third strategy. Mutual translation is conceivable outside the structural situation of asymmetrical relationships and hegemony only as a deliberately incomplete one – when it is recognized that the synchrony of foreign cultural experiences is elusive due to the specificity of local contexts and conventions, as well as incongruent temporalities, thus rendering immediate or complete mutual understanding impossible.