Relocation of Culture

The Relocation of Culture is about accents and borders—about people and cultures that have accents and that cross borders. It is a book that deals with translation and nomadic identities, and with the many ways in which the increasing relevance of forced migrations has affected the practice of languages and the understanding of cultures in our times. Simona Bertacco and Nicoletta Vallorani examine the theoretical and practical nexus of translation and migration, two of the most visible and anxiety-producing keywords of our age, and use translation as the method for a global cultural theory firmly based in the humanities, both as creative output and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Positioning their work within the field of translation studies with important borrowings from literary and cultural studies, visual and migration studies, the authors suggest a theory of translation that makes space for complexity, considers different “languages” (words, images, sounds, bodies), and takes into account both our emotional, pre-linguistic and instinctual reaction to the other as an invader and an enemy and the responsibility for the other that lies at the heart of translation. This process necessarily involves a reflection on the location and relocation of cultures in contemporary times.

Simona Bertacco is Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities and Director of Graduate Studies in the Humanities at the University of Louisville, USA. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures in English, with special attention to issues of translation, gender, and poetics. Her most recent publications include: Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures (2014) and the special issues of The New Centennial Review: Translation and the Global Humanities (2016) and Altre Modernitá: Disrespected Literatures: Reversals of Linguistic Oppression (2019).

Nicoletta Vallorani is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. Her lines of research mostly combine the fields of visual studies and postcolonial studies, with references to film studies. She has recently published on migration in the Mediterranean Sea (Nessun Kurtz: Cuore di tenebra e le parole dell’Occidente, 2017; Forms of Loss: Dead Bodies and Other Objects, 2018), the intersections between crime fiction and migration studies (Postcolonial Crime, 2014), and the literary representations of the urban margins (Millennium London: Of Other Spaces and the Metropolis, 2012).