ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the controversy around the translation of Amanda Gorman’s poem for the US presidential inauguration through the lens of identity politics as originally articulated in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black radical feminists. The Right and Left alike have criticized a distorted sense of identity politics as a divisive and essentializing concept, but for the women of Combahee, identity is a position from which to launch a politics in solidarity with other marginalized groups rather than a dogmatically policed social category. With this in mind, this chapter re-evaluates the public call for a Black woman spoken word poet to translate Gorman’s poem into Dutch neither as strict identity matching nor as a simple opportunity for more “diverse” translations but as part of a situated politics in which a Black translator might not only be a different translator but also translate differently. The chapter presents examples of work by Black women translators who enact identity politics in their practice, demonstrating how it can lead to coalitional solidarity in support of racial justice as opposed to a liberal humanist vision of “diversity” that reproduces the norms of white supremacy.
