ABSTRACT
The relationship between translation and identity is attracting increasing attention in academia and the media. This chapter explores identity from a historical perspective in order to explain its paradoxical upsurge in interdisciplinary academic debates and in political discourse and mobilisation. It introduces wide-ranging sociological issues and debates on both personal or individual identity and social or collective identity. A critique of identity in the context of proliferating societal strangeness is undertaken from a perspective that puts the foreigner and translation at the centre. Inspired by Theodor Adorno's approach to non-identity, translation is proposed as an alternative to identity that is premised on interconnection and transformation, rather than being, and recent debates regarding the translation of literary texts are examined in detail under this light.
