Translation as struggle and resistance: Re-translating 19th century Tagalog revolutionary texts

PACIFIC MEDIA CENTRE SEMINAR: Indigenous meanings and epistemologies tend to be forgotten and buried, and even erased, by non-indigenist interpretations and translations. This seminar is an exploration of an ‘indigenist hermeneutic’ to a re-translation of key texts of the Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan, a 19th-century anti-colonial movement in the Spanish colony of Filipinas, the present-day Philippines. That the Katipunan used the indigenous language, Tagalog, in all their communications and not the language of their colonisers, Spanish, signified a delinking from European constructs epistemically, ethically and politically. An indigenist re-translation aims to recover indigenous meanings erased or concealed by modernising translations; and it challenges and offers an alternative interpretation to the prevailing notion in Philippine historiography that the Katipunan movement was essentially influenced by ideas from the European Enlightenment. Translation becomes a struggle and resistance against erasure, and incorporation into modernity’s Eurocentric epistemic territory.

Who: Pia Cristóbal Kahn, Master of Indigenous Studies, Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago.

When: Wednesday, 25 July 2018, 4.30-6pm

Where: WG703, City Campus

Contact: Dr Sylvia Frain

Report by Pacific Media Centre ]]>