Talk: Translation and Decolonization

In the colonial space, one imperial language presents itself as the Logos incarnate, in contrast to the local indigenous vernaculars which are then deemed lacking and incomplete. How the act of translation, of “putting in touch” languages (Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign), creates linguistic equality and reciprocity, even in a colonial situation, is the topic of this presentation.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor at Columbia University in the departments of French and Philosophy. He is currently the Director of the Institute of African Studies. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, and African Philosophy and Literature. His latest publications in English include: Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, Codesria, 2010; African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude, Seagull Books, 2011; The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Codesria, 2016; Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, Columbia University Press, 2018, and Postcolonial Bergson, forthcoming by Fordham University Press.

Sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research