Translation—the act of transferring meaning across different linguistic and cultural systems—is an unquestioned necessity. From Netflix subtitles to dual-language medical forms, it is omnipresent in our everyday lives. How does this ubiquity affect the way we think about the figure of the translator today? My dissertation, “Asia’s Translators: Global Asian Literature and the Ruptures of Representation,” attempts to theorize the figure of the translator in post-1990 Asian Anglophone and translated literature. It does so by putting two distinct patterns into dialogue. First, the rise in visibility of translators in the twenty-first century. Second, the increasing mainstream attention to Asian cultural phenomena in the Western Anglophone hemisphere. I situate these patterns within colonial histories and ongoing post-Cold War imperialisms, using the figure of the translator to address the geopolitical dynamics of today’s transnational literary landscape. Translation serves as both concrete, material practice and abstract, symbolic circulation, from which the figure of the translator emerges as both a real-life linguistic laborer and the activator of a cultural imaginary. With these points in mind, my dissertation is driven by the question: How is contemporary Asia translated within a rapidly globalizing world?

In terms of contents, this project analyzes the constructions and translations of Asia that circulate through post-1990 literature. In the last two centuries, we have seen a rapid rise in the popularity of translated fiction from Asia, as well as a surge in Anglophone fiction by authors of Asian descent. What forms of (self-)representation do these literatures depict? Postcolonial and Asian American studies scholars have fixated on representation to examine the fraught relationship between the metropole majority and the non-hegemonic minority (whether that is the Oriental Other, the subaltern, the coolie, and so on). While drawing on such scholarship, I focus on the crucial role played by the translator within literature’s intercultural and interlinguistic representations. I analyze contemporary translations of Asian authors, including ones that allegedly contain mistranslations, as well as examples of translators and interpreters within contemporary Anglophone Asian diasporic literature.

I see my dissertation triangulating three fields of inquiry: translation studies, postcolonial theory, and “Global Asia” studies—a new but rapidly growing discourse that mines the tensions between ethnic and area studies. Ultimately, my project offers a theorization of Global Asia as a translated, imagined, and multiplicitous narrative—propelled through circuits of literary production.