ABSTRACT
Within the context of empire, of which colonization is a form, translation arrives as violence. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon considers the erasure attendant on translation as the cornerstone of colonial subjectivity – the other side of the coin of the colonizer’s sense of ‘superiority’ and ‘ordained mandate’. He examines the way colonialism is internalized by the colonized, who seeks to embody the language and culture of the oppressor: ‘He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness’. Tzvetan Todorov looks to the discovery of America as an exemplary case for understanding the relationship between language and colonization, and comes to a stark conclusion: that European literacy was the principle mode through which the conquest of the Americas was achieved. For Eric Cheyfitz, the primal crime of the colonial enterprise was and continues to be the translation of non-fungible Native land into Western property so that Indigenous peoples could be ‘legally’ dispossessed of the ground of life.
