ABSTRACT
While other chapters call for more engagement in translation studies with critical race studies, this chapter argues for more incorporation of translation and translation studies into critical race studies. As with Western academia in general, critical race studies is dominated by English-language scholarship, and its frameworks for understanding race are relatively US-centric. Translation is an important means by which to bring other international perspectives on race into the discipline, but translation studies also demonstrates how the process of translation can still manipulate texts into Western norms of academic discourse. More reflexivity about translation in critical race studies would call attention to translation’s role in shaping knowledge-production and also provide a means for exploring the disjunctures between different linguistic and cultural constructions of race in generative ways. Following the work of Brent Hayes Edwards, the last part of the chapter looks at these disjunctures through translations of words designating racial blackness between French and English in texts by Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe. Translation emerges as a key site at which racial meanings are negotiated.
