Panel: Complex Zones and Contact Zones in the Modern Middle East
Copanelists: Leila Golafshani and Amany Al-Sayyed
Sherry Simon’s collection of essays on translation, Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, demonstrates that cultural translation functions as a mode of knowledge production that can help evaluate, challenge, and possibly alter commonly accepted understandings of certain cultural communities. In this context, then, the role of the translator is to question the politically motivated narratives that confine cultural communities to certain representations, and to articulate a more productive form of cultural exchange where both sides of the cultural divide can learn from each other. For this paper, I am interested in looking at the autobiographical work of the journalist turned memoirist as a form of cultural translation. I propose to focus on Iranian American journalist Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran, in which she recreates her experiences as the Time Magazine correspondent in Tehran from the spring of 2000 until the end of 2001. Moaveni’s task as translator is a complex one, as she cumulates the roles of reporter translating events into news reports, autobiographer translating personal experiences into meaningful stories, and ethnographer translating aspects of Iranian culture into an American framework of references. How does she negotiate these multiple layers of meaning making? What textual strategies does she use to represent this process of resignification? What are the implications of such acts of translation?
My paper will explore these questions and suggest that Moaveni’s memoir helps articulate new meanings for her previous knowledge about Iranian culture and politics and their relationships to her American world. Positioned in the contact zone between the West and the Middle East, Moaveni speaks to her North American readers with the authority granted to her by American institutions, but with the privileged knowledge of the Iranian insider. Her work therefore troubles the easy identification of “foreign” and “home” cultures, as Moaveni does not simply translate elements from one culture into the other. Instead, she provides a startling translation that demonstrates the ways in which both Iranian and American cultures interact and respond to each other.
Monday, June 23 • 12:30–1:45 • Keoni Auditorium
Keynote Panel: Life Writing and Translations—Word by Word
Copanelists: Mary Besemeres, Bella Brodzki, and Julia Watson
Manuela Costantino teaches in the Department of English and Coordinated Arts Program at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in Translation Studies and transcultural autobiography, and has published on Canadian migrant autobiography and life narratives from/about the Middle East.