ABSTRACT
Thinking from the South, the intervention this collection undertakes, is necessarily one of translation – between scales of representation and materiality, between ontology and epistemology, and crucially between chronotopes of encounter. As such, thinking from the South – in its very proposition – is compelled to shift the interzone of encounter from ‘the West’ and a world full of its aspirationally cosmopolitan ‘Others’ to a more horizontal, thus ultimately more multilingual conception of inter-subjective interactions and collaboratively translated personhoods: interactions and translations that unfold in a world of mutually negotiated alterities that resist the flat, commensurative relativisms of Anglo-multiculturalism in a still-decolonizing world. In this paper, I explore the indispensability of translation as social practice not only in the particular instance of Afro-Chinese interactions, but in the broader context of non-Western encounters beyond the settler-colonial encounter. This is a step that I hope will be of benefit to many projects of intellectual decolonization that take thinking from the South as their starting point. Demonstrating a pragmatics of postcolonial translation, I analyze the reflexive, inter-subjective mediation of Southern African and Chinese ‘culture’ concepts – those of Ubuntu and guanxi (关系).
