The link between translation and migration is a recurrent trope of recent critical writing. Its popularity underlines the increased centrality of both notions (and corresponding practices) in contemporary society, as well as the anxieties associated with them. Starting from translation as a linguistic activity, this article asks in what ways language practices connected to migration can be linked to translation. It considers the different positions occupied by migrants as agents or objects of translation, and the sites where translation and self-translation take place. The language practices which emerge from migrant writing are then discussed as a possible example of self-translation, asking whether the migrant-asartist can offer at least a partial response to negative models of translation as a form of control over linguistic heterogeneity. Finally, the article examines the connection between migration, translation and political action, suggesting the need to understand how these relate to a contemporary biopolitics of language.Keywords: translation and migration; self-translation; migrant writing; biopolitics of language; globalization Linking translation with migration has become a recurrent trope in critical writing over the past few years. The connection between the two notions has been drawn by translation studies scholars but also, and increasingly, by specialists in anthropology, sociology, philosophy or literary theory. The popularity of the link is in itself revealing: it underlines the increased centrality of migration and of translation (as notions but also as practices) in contemporary society; and it foregrounds the suggestive as well as anxiety-inducing nature of any interweaving of the two. Since both terms are connected to the way in which we, as individuals and as groups, mark the boundaries that define who we are, their coupling holds out the promise of
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The history of Italians and of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration. While those experiences mark the history of the peninsula well before the formation of the Italian state, since the time of unification, in particular, a series of narratives about mobility and nation has been produced both inside and outside the boundaries of Italy by agents such as the Italian state, international organizations or migrant communities themselves. Statistical data, disciplinary canons and historical accounts are just some of the instruments that have been deployed to construct representations of what it means to be ‘Italian’. Notions of citizenship and national borders have been variously constructed by essentializing conceptualizations of language, culture or heritage. Narratives may have converged or diverged over time, but they have all aimed to stabilize and fix the inherently dynamic and plural nature of Italian identities and cultures. And, while mobility is at the heart of all these narratives, the value attached to it can be positive or negative, and is often ambivalent....
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