The act of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana maintains, is a political action. Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages. The traditional view of translation underwritten by Western philosophy helped colonialism to construct the exotic "other" as unchanging and outside history, and thus easier both to appropriate and control.

Scholars, administrators, and missionaries in colonial India translated the colonized people's literature in order to extend the...

Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what Indian signifies about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that Indianness is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the...

Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad's population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what "Indian" signifies--about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion--in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that "Indianness" is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within...