A cross-disciplinary roundtable on the feminist politics of translation: Richa Nagar, Kathy Davis, Judith Butler, AnaLouise Keating, Claudia De Lima Costa, Sonia E. Alvarez and Ayşe Gül Altınay, edited by Emek Ergun and Olga Castro

This roundtable, which emerged from an idea initially proposed by Richa Nagar, explores the feminist politics of translation from different disciplinary, epistemological and geopolitical perspectives and locations. Recognising the broad, contentious semantic fields of the two key concepts of this volume, feminism and translation, we kept the questions guiding the conversation as open-ended as possible. We hope that our conversation inspires other cross-disciplinary, cross-organisational and cross-cultural dialogues about the enabling and disabling roles of translation in the production, dissemination, reception, appropriation and transformation of feminist theories, knowledges and practices within and across borders that paradoxically separate and connect us, albeit often through asymmetrical power relations. Our conversation has revealed not only the transgressive potential of translation as a concept, theory and practice, but also the urgency of finding out new ways of talking to one another across differences and hierarchies. This conversation is urgent because, as Sara Ahmed notes in Strange Encounters (2000, 167), “Women in different nation spaces, within a globalised economy of difference, cannot not encounter each other, what is at stake is how, rather than whether, the encounters take place” (emphasis original). One indispensable element of such encounters is translation, without which we cannot imagine nor exercise or organise alternative forms of “globalisation” in pursuit of liberation, justice and co-existence for all. It is this kind of sensibility that guides this roundtable discussion among seven feminist scholars, each of whom explores the political potential of translation to enable “strange encounters” that imagine and exercise alternative kinds of intimacies, worldings and assemblages.