ABSTRACT
Through the prism of translation, the author maintains, teachers of comparative literature can at once reprise the paradigms and surprise the limits that postcolonialism imposes on dominant understandings of world literary relations today. His graduate seminar on "(Post)Colonial Translation", offered in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, provides a case in point. Shuttling between critical translation theory, literary history, and imaginative literature, the seminar interrogates the role of translation interlingual, ontological, epistemological, cultural in imperialism and (post)coloniality. In extra-European texts, students sometimes seek an anticolonial or a postcolonial posture more oppositional than it really was or is. Translation redefines their views of domination and resistance, veering as it does between complicity and opposition. Sakai takes the constructions of modern Japan and a unitary Japanese language in the face of the imperial West as paradigms for a critical reconsideration of translation theory.
