Article

L O ST ( A N D F O U N D ? ) I N TR ANSL ATION: FE M I N I S M S IN HEMISPHERIC D IALOGUE

Cl a ud i a d e L i ma Co s t a 1
polis, Brazil and Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Floriano University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1 This study was carried out in collaboration with Vero nica Feliu

A b s t ra c t
This paper is a conceptual effort to bring together reflections by feminist and other translation theorists on the travels and translations of feminist theories in the Americas. It represents an attempt to explore issues concerning feminism, translation, and transnationalism in relation to building feminist alliances among different feminist constituencies not only across the NorthSouth axis, but in other latitudinal and longitudinal directions as well.

Ke y wo rds
feminist theories; travels; translation; transnationalism; Latinas; Latin Americans

Fe minism, t ranslation, and tra nsnationalism

In contemporary globalized post-colonial formations, in light of the reconfiguration of knowledges and the contemporary remapping of all kinds of borders (geographic, economic, political, cultural, libidinal, among others), the problematic of translation has become an important, as well as recent, domain of feminist contention.2 In the context of diverse, interconnected histories of travel and displacement (Clifford, 1997, 18) and the transnational traffic in theories and concepts, the question of
c 2006 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/06 $30.00 Latino Studies 2006, 4, (6278) www.palgrave-journals.com/lst

2 The project behind this conceptual effort

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------63
began as the result of a Latin American Studies Association (LASA) congress panel in 2000, put together by Sonia E. Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa, and with the participation of scholars from the University of California at Santa Cruz, as well as other universities in the Greater Bay Area. Papers from this panel were later revised and published in a special section of the Revista Estudos Feministas, vol. 8, no. 2, 2000 (accessible at www.portalfeminista. org.br). Shortly after the congress panel, a one-day miniconference was held at UCSC in February 2001, and a UCSC Chicano and Latino Research Center (CLRC) research cluster was constituted to explore issues concerning feminism, translation, and transnationalism. Since then, our research cluster has been meeting regularly in workshops at UCSC under the auspices of CLRC and has organized subsequent LASA panels (Washington D.C., 2001; Dallas, 2003; Las Vegas, 2004; Puerto Rico, 2006). We are currently working on an edited collection on feminist

translation becomes quite pertinent and constitutes a unique space from which, on the one hand, to take on critical analyses of representation and power and the asymmetries between languages and, on the other, to examine the knowledge formations and institutionalities in/through which these theories and concepts travel. In summary, at this moment when mobility, proximity, approximation (Chow, 1995), promoted by the movements of capital and the transnationalization of culture, have signaled the entrance of increasingly disparate regions into a forced and homogeneous modernity, to theorize the process of translation (to translate translation) requires an analysis of the various economies within which the sign of translation circulates. We should begin clarifying that the use of the term translation is borrowed from Niranjanas (1992) deployment of the concept, that is, it does not refer exclusively to discussions about the strategies for semiotic processes in the area of translation studies, but to debates on cultural translation. The notion of cultural translation (drawing on debates on ethnographic theory and practice) is premised upon the view that any process of description, interpretation, and dissemination of ideas and worldviews is always already caught up in relations of power and asymmetries between languages, regions, and peoples.3 Much ink has been spilled about the travels of theories across different topographies and through itineraries that are ever more complex. The metaphor of traveling theory was first introduced by Said (1983), who looked at the movement of theories as embedded in other cultural practices, larger historical contexts, and power struggles. Since then, it became a traveling metaphor taken up by many other theorists who wanted to examine the conditions shaping the constitution of knowledge formations through the traffic of ideas and concepts, including the changing conditions of traveling in increasingly transnationalized, yet unequal, world economy and academic markets.4 In the traffic of theories, John (1996) argues, those that travel more easily articulate such a high level of abstraction that any question of context is rendered irrelevant (e.g., deconstruction, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, etc.). While crossing territories, theories are continuously appropriated and transformed by their local readings, acquiring a more composite structure. Feminist theories fall under this category, for in making simultaneous use of several registers (material, political, cultural frameworks), they are forged at different levels of abstraction.5 In the context of the Americas, in the interactions between Latina and LatinAmerican feminisms, the travels of discourses and practices encounter formidable roadblocks and migratory checkpoints when they attempt to cross borders. This is in part not only due to the existence of certain dominant and exclusionary institutional configurations, but also due to the fact that different historiographies have excluded subjects and subjectivities from both sides of the NorthSouth divide (and within each side), making the possibility of productive dialogue a daunting political and epistemological challenge. Given these difficulties, the questions posed early on in our conversation were: How is academic knowledge

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------64

transnational translations. The present paper is the result of several conversations that took place during these workshops, and we acknowledge the invaluable contributions by the research cluster participants. We are also grateful to Sonia E. Alvarez, Patricia Zavella, and two anonymous reviewers for their incisive readings and suggestions for revisions of earlier versions of this manuscript. Claudia de Lima Costa thanks the Brazilian government research council, CNPq, for financial support for this ongoing research. 3 The importance and relevance that languages as tools and apparatuses of power have in all processes of translation should not, of course, be neglected. 4 Knapp (2005) observes that these days and in certain regions of the globe, smuggling may be a more appropriate term to describe the movement of theories. 5 Discussions of feminist ethnographies have shown that because feminism derives its theory from a practice grounded in the materiality of womens oppression

conveyed from one hemisphere to another? What is lost in translation, and why, in conversations between Latinas and Latin-American feminists? The point of departure of this paper and of our research cluster interrogations was the insight that the relationalities and attachments that different analytical categories have as they travel will greatly influence their ability to translate. For instance, while the project of subaltern studies was in a first moment anchored to theory and detached from projects of race and gender, the project of women of color from the start has been anchored to race. However, race is a category that is read in specific ways in different racial formations, hence the (un)translatability of the US concept woman of color when carried to other topographies.6 Likewise, resistance to Latinas and Chicanas concerns in some Latin-American feminist quarters, which were often racialized and quickly dismissed as not serious or relevant to Latin American matters, indicate how questions of sexuality, race, and class are obliterated at the same time that a universal subject of Latin-American feminism is produced. An important issue facing feminists engaged in the process of translation while crossing borders, then, is to mediate linguistic, cultural, racial, and other barriers so as to create sites for alliances and cross-border talk that does not lead to cross-talk (Carrillo, 1998). The recent polemic spurred by an article by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999), in which these two sociologists criticize the transnational circulation and importation of US-based ideas and models, serves as an illustration of the problematic of translation when some categories are transported from one context to another. As French (2003, 376) has incisively put it, Bourdieu and Wacquant describe the global export of concepts (including the imposition, for instance, of a US blackand-white model of race relations in Brazil) as the proliferating Macdonaldization of out-of-place ideas, hence neglecting the dynamics of reading and translation through which foreign ideas come to be incorporated into national intellectual fields, each with its own historical trajectory, cultural formation, and social mythologies. According to French,
Their simplistic model of US domination/imposition and subaltern submission/complicity is empirically and theoretically wrongheaded. It erases the process of local appropriation while vastly exaggerating the power and influence that US-based notions have had or can have in Brazil. In summary, they make a fetish of the foreign origin of ideas (itself questionable) while depicting the process of transnational exchange as inherently one-sided. Worst of all, their call for resistance is vitiated by their own preference for taking refuge behind flimsy nationalist barricades rather than conducting serious transnational intellectual and political debate (376).

To engage in debates about the appropriation/translation of ideas necessitates an exploration of how theories travel through the NorthSouth axis. An

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------65
(regardless of the complexity of this category), the political dimensions of the ethnographic text are always already articulated to its emplotment in contingent, conjunctural translations of the other. Ethical, political, and epistemological dilemmas apart feminist or otherwise I concur with Stacey (1988) in that the exchange and reciprocity encountered in the fieldwork process will always be asymmetrical, especially if the other being studied finds herself in a situation of utter fragility and powerlessness. However, as Thayer (2001) has pointed out, in other settings such as conducting interviews with social movement leaders and activists the geometries of power may be entirely different, and the so-called subaltern may be, after all, quite empowered by her/his engagement in a collective struggle for social rights and justice, self-representation and self-determination. 6 For an interesting discussion of the travels of the concept of race from the North-American context to Germany, see Knapp (2005).

example is given by Masiellos (2000, 55) reading of the pages of Las/12, the feminist supplement of the Argentinean daily Pagina/12, to examine how materials of cultural theory move from one language to another, and how the screen aura of celebrities can be reread from the Southern margin, how sexuality is resemanticized when it crosses the borders of home and state. Masiellos keen analysis of Las/12 reveals that through the mechanisms of sensationalism and satire, which stress the artifice of representation, and in a playful language aimed at a mass reading public, its editors and collaborators interrogate, through the perspective of a (Latin American) lesbian gaze, the relationship between gender, sexuality, and translation so as to sabotage the normative NorthSouth flow of meanings established by the neoliberal market economy. The cultural translations and (mis)appropriations of market constructions of gender in the pages of the Argentinian supplement Las/12 (such as, for instance, representations of Latinas in Hollywood cinema, the culture of Hollywood celebrities, the imposition of fashion upon the female body, and so forth) not only offer readers alternative reflections about female identity, but also upset the NorthSouth traffic of commodity culture by dismantl[ing] a sense of woman as projected by mass media venues and academic theory (54): La mujer no es un suplemento (woman is not a supplement) (52). Turning from daily supplement to literary texts, Dom nguez (2000) reads some Latin American fictional narratives7 to explore how these texts, by interpellating a nomad subject, construct a space in between different languages national and foreign, private and political, written and oral, the language of exile and the language of the return as well as in-between systems of meanings and contact zones (North America, Latin America, Europe). For the novels narrators in question, it is from these interstitial spaces and through the metaphor of translation that an appropriate understanding of the mechanisms forging gendered social identities through continuous processes of translation can be built, revealing how foreign theories and concepts are brought into friction and dialogue with local experiences so as to enable identifications and deidentifications, as well as configurations of alternative theoretical cartographies. Another example of the processes of identification and de-identification entailed by strategies of translation is discussed by Davis (2002). In her scrutiny of the worldwide dissemination of the book Our Bodies, Our Selves, put together by the Boston Womens Health Book Collective in 1971 considered a NorthAmerican artifact and at the time one of the most important and progressive references for womens health both in the US and abroad the author probes the extent to which Western (US-based) feminism (under the garb of global feminism) is imposed on the bodies and minds of women situated in other contexts, Western and non-Western. Addressing the feminism-as-cultural-imperialism critique, articulated by several US feminists engaged in the deconstruction of the notion of a global sisterhood, the author assesses the pitfalls of global feminism and the possibilities of transnational alliances for the circulations of feminist

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------66

7 The Latin American writers examined by Dom nguez are Diamela Eltit, Tunuma Mercado, Matilde Sa nchez, and Clarice Lispector.

knowledges and body/politics (229). Davis examines the border crossings of Our bodies, Our Selves (BWHBC, 1971) in the WestEast, NorthSouth directions to argue that different local material conditions ranging from availability of funding resources for translators, computer equipment, to publishing houses coupled by ideological configurations, the presence of philanthropic foundations, international donors, womens groups and/or feminist non-governmental organizations greatly influenced translation strategies of the book to better adapt it to the needs and experiences of different womens constituencies. Looking at these travels and translations of Our Bodies, Our Selves (OBOS), Davis concludes that
the translations which emerged in the three decades following the first edition of OBOS indicate that it was not the notion of global sisterhood which traveled (y). On the contrary, what traveled was how the original collective wrote the book. The image of a group of (lay)women collectively sharing knowledge about their embodied experiences seems to be what fired the imagination of women in different parts of the world and served as an invitation to do the same. While the notion of global sisterhood creates a spurious universality, which denies differences among women, the process by which the original collective wrote their book could be taken up fairly easily by a diversity of women and adapted to their specific circumstances. It was the method of knowledge sharing and not a shared identity as women which appeared to have a global appeal, making OBOS a case in point for a transnational feminist body/politics based on oppositional practices rather than identity politics (240, 241).

Looking at the travels of Our Bodies, Our Selves, as well as the gender concept in the Latin American context (more specifically, in Brazil), Thayer (2000) focuses on the complex articulations of political, economic, racial, and ideological factors constitutive of these localities and their relation to larger, more globalized forces. Taking as its point of departure the non-governmental organization SOS Corpo in Recife, Northeast Brazil, Thayer analyzes the initial appropriation of the book by its feminist constituency and the ways in which, in the span of two decades (19801990s) and against the background of military dictatorship, followed by transition to democracy and democratic consolidation, its re-semantization responded to varying local social movement practices and discourses around political demands for citizenship rights. The author examines how the concept of the individual body in the pages of Our Bodies, Our Selves is articulated by the SOS Corpo feminists to the idea of the political body as a platform for demands for basic (citizenship) rights, therefore showing how translations are the result of ongoing processes of negotiation and not one-way impositions. However, as Thayer acutely observes, despite having originated in the context of the SOS Corpo practices and discussions, the local meanings of the concept of citizenship were also influenced by international donors and transnational feminisms. Thayer

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------67

concludes by arguing that economic and discursive barriers prevent feminist theories and concepts from treading in the SouthNorth direction. It is incumbent upon the transnational feminist movement and the diasporic intellectual to open up spaces that would allow for more horizontality and symmetry in the global flux of theories, concepts, discourses and identities. In the contemporary scenario of fragmented identities, contact zones, and border epistemologies, it is incumbent upon feminist critics to scrutinize the processes of cultural translation of feminist theories/concepts so as to develop what has been dubbed a geopolitical or transnational ability to read and write (Friedman, 1998; Spivak, 1992) toward the articulation of transnational feminisms (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). This task demands mapping the dislocations and continual translations of feminist theories/concepts, as well as the constraints mechanisms of mediation and technologies of control imposed in the transit of theories across geopolitical borders. For example, Braidotti (2000, 720), scrutinizing the problematic export of French post-structuralism to the highly commodified US academic market (where it is profoundly depoliticized in its reception), argues that a full-scale analysis of the travels/translations of theories needs to take account of the nature of the institutions of learning, the centralized status of theory, [and] the norms and taboos of representation at the point of arrival.8 However, as has been previously argued by Stam (2001) and Shohat (2002), to locate the emergence of post-structuralism in the West is itself an effect of translation. For these authors, to ignore the contribution of anti-colonial and subaltern theorizing in the decentering of Eurocentric master narratives, thereby occluding how Third Worldist thinking was codified by those associated with structuralism and post-structuralism, is to give this theoretical corpus a white coating and a French accent.9 Therefore, a close scrutiny of the traffic in theories or the transportation of texts might also reveal the operations of intellectual, conceptual imperialism (y) most notably in the forms of racism and colonialism (Jardine, 1988, 14). One of the pertinent questions to ask of the travels and translations of feminist theories and practices would be: By what means and through which institutionalities do feminist concepts/discourses/practices gain temporary (or even permanent) residence in different representational economies? It is well known that texts do not travel across linguistic contexts without a visa (translations always entail some sort of cost). Their dislocation can only take place if there is also a material apparatus organizing their translation, publication, circulation, and reception. This materiality which is at the same time constituted by, and constitutive of, the contexts of reception influences in significant ways which theories/texts get translated and are resignified for a better fit with local intellectual agendas. Acts of reading (modes of reception) are acts of appropriation carried out in contexts of power (institutional, economic, political, and cultural). In the travels of feminist theories in the Americas, there are several theory brokers ranging from academics, international and national donors situated in

8 In Latin America, however, we have witnessed an opposite trend within feminist circles and in the context of dictatorship and post-dictatorship: there have been highly politicized appropriations of so-called Westernbased theories such as, for instance, those of Foucault and Bourdieu. 9 Hall (1996) makes a similar argument concerning the contested space in which the post-colonial operates. To prevent the concept from becoming another way the West appropriates the nonWest in order to think about itself, Hall, instead of jettisoning the concept

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------68

altogether, suggests that it should be deployed in a way that forces us to re-read binarisms (e.g., before/after, here/there, colonize/ colonized, center/ periphery) as forms of cultural translation responding to the new relations of power in the aftermath of independency and decolonization. The post-colonial, hence, is a way of re-reading colonization as part of a transnational and transcultural global process with the result of producing a de-centered account of the imperial narratives of the past anchored in the nation. See also Ahluwalia (2005) for a fascinating discussion of the African roots of post-structuralism through the reading of Derridas and Cixous autobiographies. 10 In earlier work (Costa, 1998), I reflected on the travels of the category of experience from the context of US poststructuralist feminist theory into the context of Brazilian sem teto (homeless) women. 11 For a sampling of pointed theoretical interventions by Latina feminists that revert the trend of

State and philanthropic organizations, feminist NGOs, and grassroots womens organizations and movements. These different and diverse mediators as Thayer (2001) and Alvarez (2000) have convincingly shown (and whose arguments will be explored below) have a certain agency in the cross-border movement of feminist theories/discourses. Both in the US and Latin America, the academy and feminist NGOs are the two most important locales for the production, circulation, and reception of feminisms. However, ongoing economic crises in Latin America have put serious constraints in the circulation of feminist theories, and within the US, Chicana/Latina productions have not always counted on effective apparatuses of dissemination, given the still pervasive dismissal of subaltern knowledges within the US academy.

Tra n s l a t i o n p rac t i c e s a n d t h e t ra f f i c in ge n d e r
One way of assessing the political gains and/or losses in the traffic in theories within feminism is to look at the uneven migrations of one of its foundational categories, gender.10 Some versions of US feminist theories emphasis on difference (a response, in the social terrain, to political pressures from women of color and lesbian feminists in the US), together with the deconstruction of identity categories (an outcome, in the epistemological terrain, of the advent of post-structuralism), led many US academic feminists to proclaim the disintegration of gender in light of the fractures of class, race, sexuality, age, historical particularity and other individual differences constitutive of the post-modern heteroglossia. Other feminists, contesting the dispersal of both woman and gender, amply criticized what they viewed as a dangerous trend in the 1990s: the emergence of feminism without women (Modleski, 1991). There are still others, including many Latina feminists, who, when confronting a devastating scenario of volatile bodies and evasive analytical categories in which everything is reduced to parodic performances reaffirm the need to fight against the atomization of differences by asserting a positive identity for women through the articulation of differences among women with the structures of domination that helped produce those differences in the first place (Benhabib, 1995).11 While these theoretical debates on gender took hold in the US academy, States and inter-governmental agencies in the Americas amply adopted the gender category in their public policies and social programs directed toward promoting gender equity. Alvarez (1998), analyzing feminist incursions in the State during the political opening toward gender, for instance, argues that feminist critiques of womens oppression and subordination become diluted and neutralized in the discourses and practices of these institutions. In Alvarezs words,
[d]espite the local and global feminist lobbies central role in advocating for the changed international gender norms that helped foster such apparently gender-friendly State policies and discourses, however, the terms of womens,

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------69
some versions of post-mortem feminisms, see the debates on experience from the perspective of a post-positivist realism as articulated by Moya (2002), Moya and Hames-Garc a (2000), Stone-Mediatore (2000), and Sandoval (2000).

especially poor womens, incorporation into neoliberal State policies are not necessarily feminist-inspired. One Colombian local government official neatly summed up how feminists political indictment of womens subordination is too often translated or tergiversated by State bureaucrats when she told me: now things have changed, its no longer that radical feminism of the 1970s, now its public policies with a gender perspective (pol ticas pu blicas con perspectiva de ge nero) (271).

However, as Alvarez (2000) points out, it is in the arena of policy advocacy at a supranational level that feminism has proven to be most successful in the task of translation and the fashioning of local feminist political grammars and symbolic maps. Analyzing Latin American feminist movements encuentros and international policy advocacy networks, Alvarez identifies two logics intersecting these different, yet interconnected terrains: identity-solidarity logic (oriented towards creating an imagined feminist community, politicized identities, and ideological affinities), and transnational intra-governmental advocacy logic (oriented toward influencing gender policies through venues such as the UN conferences). These logics feed into one another in complex ways. According to the author, feminist encuentros help local activists to build international ties of solidarity, political affinities and shared identities with positive repercussions for their local movement practices and struggles. Participating in arenas such as the UN conferences requires specialized skills at policy advocacy that many feminist activists did not (and do not) necessarily have. However, given that the encuentros have facilitated the formation of transnational social networks and nurtured intense personal and political bonds (y) among feminists in far-flung reaches of Latin America, [thus contributing to] (y) the creation of policy-focused networks and regional advocacy coalition (43), involvement in the transnationalized gender policy advocacy has, in turn, reverberated back on the home front in the local translations and deployments of internationally sanctioned political scripts.12 Despite the two-way flows of the above logics, these translations, Alvarez alerts, have not always been unproblematic. Often times the local appropriations/resignifications of the transnational advocacy logic exacerbat[ed] existing power imbalances among activists and organization (56). Asymmetries result when greater local political capital and resources are accrued to activists and organizations with easier access (due to various reasons) to the transnational public spaces of policy advocacy. Notwithstanding these imbalances, more frequently than not we can witness Southern-inspired appropriations of Northern-based womens lobby. In the words of one of Alvarezs interviewees, though she initially found the [advocacy] concept abstract and foreign, It has been mixing with my Latin American mestizaje (mestiza identity), and I have appropriated it and ascribed it new meaning from Latin America and from my own experience (56). While States and inter-governmental agencies unabashedly embraced gender, the Vatican, during its preparation for the 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing,

12 To be true to Alvarezs arguments, there are more dimensions and complexities to these intersecting logics than is reflected in this brief summary.

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------70

13 According to Machado (1997), French feminism and its foregrounding of difference through deconstruction did not fully enter the fields of anthropology, sociology, and history in France. Like in Brazil, its institutional place remained in literary and

and fearful of the consequences that the use of the word gender might entail such as the acceptance of homosexuality, the destruction of the (patriarchal) family, and the dissemination of feminism was orchestrating an intractable attack to the concept of gender, associating it to a sinister foreign influence (Franco, 1998). As Franco tells us, in the warning of the auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, the use of the word gender as a purely cultural construct detached from the biological ... would make us into fellow travelers of radical feminism (281). Although it would be a clear exaggeration to say that gender was a sinister influence (much to the contrary), as an analytical category it did leave room for depoliticizing moves. Since, in the Brazilian academy, the words feminism and feminist theories conveyed a radical attitude, many Brazilian feminist academics adopted the gender studies rubric to describe their scholarly activities so as to ` -vis the scientific community. A focus on gender studies, as retain credibility vis-a opposed to feminist studies, allowed them some modicum of rigor and excellence (according to positivist definitions) and secured them a (somewhat) safe place in the canon which, in turn, was not challenged. In the scenario of gender studies in Brazil, one could study womens oppression and the unequal power relations between women and men without necessarily being engaged in a feminist political project. There was not, in the supposedly neutral terrain of gender, the need to politicize theory and to theorize politics. To understand this contextual take on gender, it is important to realize that Brazilian academic feminism remains poised at the crossroads of two very distinct theoretical currents. One road takes us to French structuralism, with its emphasis on complementarity (along with the ideal of equality and denial of difference), while the other summons us toward North-American poststructuralism, with its emphasis on otherness and the politicization of difference (Machado, 1997). One of the outcomes of this particular mix of theoretical tendencies in Brazilian feminism is that a large number of its practitioners in the social sciences (in contrast to many, if not most, feminist scholars in the humanities) embraced the term gender studies more willingly than their literary counterparts, who still held on to the signifier woman.13 For the former group, gender was perceived as being a more scientifically rigorous term than either womens or feminist studies. Womens studies seemed too essentialist and feminist studies sounded too militant, therefore not objective or systematic.14 This controversy nicely captures the fact that, to gauge how well gender travels, one needs to examine thoroughly the analytic and historical constraints inhabiting the articulation of difference (John, 1996).15 As Scott (1988) herself put it, worried about the ease with which gender had entered the academy, [g]ender seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the (supposedly strident) politics of feminism. [y] It does not carry with it a necessary statement about inequality or power nor does it name the aggrieved (and hitherto) invisible party (31).

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------71
psychoanalytic studies. 14 For an illustration of these debates, see the state of the art article by anthropologist Heilborn and sociologist Sorj (1999). However, insofar as the problematic of translation is foregrounded here, it is somewhat remarkable that, when writing about the travels of gender studies into the Brazilian academic context, Heilborn and Sorj refer almost exclusively to NorthAmerican debates on gender, and do not offer any reflections on how such debates were interpreted locally. 15 Another crucial constraint, which I explored in an earlier article (Costa, 2000), is the fact that Brazilian universities are, to this day, among the most elitist (therefore whitest) of institutions.

At present this proclivity in gender studies in the Brazilian academy is fully consolidated through the fashionable and rapidly spreading field of masculinities studies (which are not necessarily articulated with a feminist critical perspective), largely due to generous grants from government agencies and national and international philanthropic institutions. However, I should note that there have been other, more politically progressive appropriations of gender in the Brazilian context. One example comes from Thayers (2000) incisive study of the NorthSouth travels of the concept. The author shows how the discursive migration of gender and its eclectic and contextually specific translations were more radical than allowed by most models of unilateral transmission between North and South of the Americas, hence illuminating the diversity of forces (e.g., financing from international institutions) and discourses (e.g., discourses about citizenship and rights) implicated in such geographical dislocations. The author makes evident how these factors complicate endlessly any movement of concepts and categories across geographic, political and epistemological boundaries.

Tra n s l at i o n a s d i sc u r s iv e mi g rat i o n
Owing to the intense migration of concepts and values that accompany the travels of texts and theories, it is often the case that a concept with a potential for political and epistemological rupture in a particular context, when carried over to another context, may become de-politicized. For Miller (1996), this happens because any concept carries within itself a long genealogy and a silent history that, transposed to other topographies, may produce unanticipated readings. However, a theorys openness to translation is a result of the performative, not cognitive, nature of language (every reading is, after all, a misreading). According to this author, theories are ways of doing things with language, one of them being the possibility of activating different readings of the social text. When introduced to a new context, the kinds of readings a theory will enact may radically transform this context. Therefore, translations, besides being intrinsically mistranslations, as Benjamin (2000) had also pointed out, will always entail defacement; when a theory travels, it disfigures, deforms and transforms the culture and/or discipline that receives it.
A theoretical formulation never quite adequately expresses the insight that comes from reading. That insight is always particular, local good for this time, place, text, and act of reading only. The theoretical insight is a glimpse out of the corner of the eye of the way language works, a glimpse that is not wholly amenable to conceptualization. Another way to put this is to say that the theoretical formulation in its original language is already a translation or mistranslation of a lost original. This original can never be recovered because it never existed as anything articulated or able to be articulated in any language. Translations of

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------72

theory are therefore mistranslations of mistranslations, not mistranslations of some authoritative and perspicuous original (Miller, 1996, 223).

16 Venuti (1998) uses the expression ethics of location in translation as a way of protecting linguistic minorities and counterweighing cosmopolitan literariness.

In the travels of theories in the Americas, one of the recurring challenges for hemispheric dialogue lies in the attempt to translate concepts that resist appropriation. How to translate ideas and concepts that have not traveled? In the politics of translation, the concern must be not only with the travels and appropriations of terms/discourses, but with the extent to which one wants to open the translated sign and to whom should it be open. The sheer convenience of incomprehension, as Brennan (2001, 53) notes, punctuates the silence on the other side of the translation process, emphasizing the fact that acts of translation do not always seek ways to communicate more accurately, but instead to mistranslate meaning subversively in order to ensure an incommunicability (53) that, in the last instance, signals the possibility of cultural survival. For Apter (2001), the silence of incommunicability represents an active resistance against simplistic models of translation transnationalism that idealize the minority language as an object of ecological preservationism (7). Many feminists, in trying to find productive ways of establishing dialogues across diverse and disperse feminist communities in the articulation of transnational alliances, have resorted to the practice of translation as a privileged site for the negotiation of difference in a world of increasing cross-border movements and cross-cultural contacts. However, their strategies in negotiating these multiple and discrepant feminist audiences, situated in different temporalit[ies] of struggles, (Mohanty, 1987, 40) have greatly varied. Grewal and Kaplan (1994), for instance, rely on the notion of a politics of location (conceived as a temporality of struggle, not a fixed position) to develop some key practices of feminist deconstructive projects, including scrutiny of the specific social relations that produce location and situated knowledges.16 Tropes of travel/displacement (such as nomadism, tourism, exile, and homelessness) deployed in modernist critical discourses often romanticize the terms of travel and elide the material conditions that produce displacement in the contemporary world. Mani (2003), in assessing how location and positionality need to be explored in relation to the production and reception of knowledge, calls for a strategy of multiple mediations when feminists confront the dilemmas of speaking to discrepant audiences within different historical moments. In presenting her work to groups in the US, Britain, and India, Mani realized how audiences in each location perceived as politically significant entirely different aspects of her work, as well as how diverse agendas in the above locations guided its reception. As she puts it, these responses in turn have caused me to reflect on how moving between different configurations of meaning and power can prompt different modes of knowing (367). Tsing (1997), in a similar vein, has asked how feminists should build alliances that do not squash diversity. Drawing on the Benjaminian (and Derridean)

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------73

notion of faithless translation (whereby texts are appropriated and rewritten so that new meanings are forged by the interaction of languages), she details how translation technologies have produced intellectual histories of feminism and environmentalism as intrinsically Western, following a West-to-the-Rest pattern of development and, in this process, creating Western histories and nonWestern cultures. Her strategy to avoid such history involves embracing three methodological caveats in order to emphasize how both feminism and environmentalism are continuously forged out of heterogeneous encounters and interactions:
First, instead of tracing a Western history of social thought, we can trace the moves in which lists of Western thinkers appear to be History; second, instead of following Western originals across non-Western cultural transformations, we can follow the narrative contexts through which foci of cultural difference are identified. Third, instead of debating the truth of Western-defined universals, we can debate the politics of their strategic and rhetorical use across the globe (254).

To avoid a framework that relies on West-to-the-Rest narratives, feminists should build diverse alliances that, in developing more South-to-South oriented dialogues, would rely on processes of continuous (and faithless) translation that would work with, rather than exclude, each other (Tsing, 1997, 269).17 A concern for the inclusion, not exclusion, of the other in cross-border dialogues and in the building of communities-in-relation also guides the theoretical project of Schutte (2000) and Shohat (2002). Drawing on the philosophical notion of incommensurability and the phenomenological-existentialist concept of alterity, Schutte claims that to communicate with the other feminists would need to recognize the multiple and disjunctive temporalities in which all the interlocutors are situated. Awareness of these multiple layers both within the self and between the self and the other, Schutte argues, may facilitate the positive reception of the richness and incommensurability of cultural difference y where the others differences, even if not fully translatable into the terms of our own cultural horizons, can be acknowledged as sites of appreciation, desire, recognition, caring, and respect (52).18 In doing so, the historiographies of identity-constructions, which vary geographically and culturally, need to be highlighted in every process of translation. For example, as previously pointed out, political labels such as women of color are not always translatable in Latin America, especially in certain contexts (e.g., Brazil) and in relation to more fluid markers of race and, precisely, color. Similarly, our readings of foundational Latin American feminist texts, such as the writings of Chilean feminist theorist Julieta Kirkwood, revealed an engagement with class and revolutionary transformation that was incommensurable in a US context. Kirkwoods writings, nonetheless, tellingly reproduced the Occidentalist, universalizing deployments of women found in some early white feminist theoretical texts in the US. This same universalizing textual

17 More often than not in debates about the travels and translations of feminist theories in the Americas, a tacit assumption is that there is an original moment in the journey and it is located in the US, thus occluding the fact that US feminist theories have been deeply informed by other currents as well, making its genealogy far more complex than initially recognized. 18 A similar argument about transnational encounters is advanced by Shih (2002). Reflecting on such encounters and the subject position of the diasporic intellectual as translator of cultural difference,

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------74

Shih contends that a way to avoid incommensurability (understood by her as the result of ignorance) is to practice an ethics of transvaluational relationality (119). This entails to situate oneself in both ones own position and the Others position, whether on the plane of gender, historical contexts, and discursive paradigms. In practice, this could mean that the Western feminist is asked to speak about Chinas problems by shifting her position from Western universalism, returning Chinese women to their original contexts and using the multiple and contradictory discursive paradigms used there (118).

move is also present in many earlier Brazilian feminist texts, as Azeredo (1994) and Caldwell (2000) have pointed out. According to the latter,
[i]t is also important to note the extent to which critiques of feminist essentialism by black Brazilian women have gone unheeded by the majority of Womens Studies scholars in Brazil. Although Afro-Brazilian feminists have attempted to address the specificities of black womens lives since at least the early-1980s, their critical insights regarding the intersection of race and gender have not been made central to the research objectives and priorities of Womens Studies. Instead, if and when the issue of racial difference has been addressed, it has largely been done by black feminist scholars and activists (95).

19 Anthropophagi, especially as conceived by the Brazilian modernist poet and critic, Oswald de Andrade, refers to a radical strategy of resistance to cultural colonialism, articulated by the Brazilian modernist movement in 1922, in which artists should digest foreign cultural products and influences, and recycle them in the construction of a synthesis that would

Shohat (2002) pushes further Schuttes argument on incommensurability (untranslatability) by asking that feminists analyze how theories and actions are translated from one context to another in building relational maps of knowledge. Instead of subscribing to a cultural relativist framework that positions the other (women) within tradition and in need of being rescued, Shohat advances a multicultural feminism as a situated practice of translation in which histories and communities are [viewed as] mutually co-implicated and constitutively related (75), hence countering segregated notions of temporality and spatiality. The need for translation, troped as cannibalism, is also stressed by Gunew (2002) in her assessment of the intellectual project undergirding US Womens Studies interdisciplinary programs. Asking whether the cultural differences permeating global feminism can be translated so that a common cultural literacy can be found, Gunew contends that to understand the varieties of feminisms and Womens Studies projects we need to explore the slippages between languages and texts through a process of faithless translation (pace Tsing, 1997). For her, the trope of cannibalism (problematically borrowed from the symbolic framework of Brazilian anthropophagi)19 should be deployed as a translating tactic to move us beyond the paralyzing battles about identity, difference, and critique. It remains an apt (albeit violent, we would add) metaphor of the power differentials inherent in all translation events, including the translations/cannibalisms that happen in inter/trans-disciplinary reconfigurations of our ways of knowing. According to this author,
The image of the cannibal, that most abject of humans (indeed, to designate someone as cannibal is to mark her or him as abject, beyond the pale) looking and speaking back to the taxonomists, the legislators or those in the know, could well function as a galvanizing icon or mascot for our future projects and our potential attainment of common cultural literacies. (65)

Finally, as King (2001) reminds us, feminist theories, discourses, and practices travel across different communities of practices. What is considered theory in one community of practice may not be seen as theory in another, so there are different meanings attached to this word. Therefore, it is important to re-think

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------75
represent Brazilian national identity. In short, the colonized artist critically devours the culture of the colonizer (difference) to create a culture that uses and resists what is other to itself. One of the problems with this metaphor, as Hollanda (1998) points out, is that anthropophagi stretched to the limit the notion that one must not identify with the Other, but assimilate only what is worthy from the Other and eliminate what is not. And it specified the way this partial assimilation should occur: it should be done by chewing, processing, and digesting the desired parts of the Other. That is, by destroying the Others uniqueness. Here we can clearly see the Brazilians preference for swallowing difference rather than confronting it. Another problem is that this elaborate discursive technology for processing otherness, erasing conflicts and avoiding confrontation, in a country of glaring racial inequalities and pervasive cordial racism, makes the anthropophagic discourse into a ruse for silencing the (racialized and

categories in transnational frames, emphasizing their movement across communities of practice, as well as new ways of creating alliances with, through, about and over the meanings of feminist theory.20 As this paper has argued, in the present times, characterized by the deepening of the linguistic turn into the translation turn, feminists in the North and South can disturb hegemonic narratives of the other, of gender, and of feminism itself through practices of translation that make visible the asymmetrical geometries of power along the local-regional-national-global nexus. It is through translation as world-traveling,21 as constant mediation between worlds, that feminists on both sides of the hemisphere are able to develop, heeding Shohats call, critical multi-axis cartographies of knowledge in webs of relationality and not in caldrons of cannibalism (where the difference of the other is ultimately assimilated into the sameness of the self) as a first and necessary step toward social transformation. Yet, challenges still remain. How can we think through the gap of translation and account for the multiple forces that overdetermine translation practices along with its strategies of containment? How can translation produce continuity across heterogeneity? These were just a few of the conundrums that have fueled our efforts to think through the vexing linkages between feminisms and transnationalisms in the translation zone.

Acknowledgements
The study was inspired by long-term conversations with Gaspar RiveraSalgado, Rufino Dominguez Santos, Centolia Maldonado, Romero, of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organization (FIOB, fomerly known as the Oaxacan Indigenous Bi-national Front). Thanks also to Olga Najera-Ramirez, Sylvia Escarcega, Maria Dolores Paris Pombo, Martha Garcia Ortega and two inclusive anonymous reviewers for their comment on earlier versions. I am also grateful to participants in the Workshop in Race and Ethnicity; what do we learn about the concepts of race and ethnicity when they are considered from a hemispheric perspective? ChicanoLatino Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz, December 10, 2003 and for seminars at the University of Chicago, the University of Oregon and Yale. The research was made possible thanks to grants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as the UC MEXUS program. The author holds the sole responsibility for what follows.

A b o u t t he a ut h o r
Claudia de Lima Costa teaches literary theory, feminist theories and cultural studies at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Floriano polis, Brazil, and is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Program of Womens Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the co-editor of Revista Estudos Feministas. Her published work on cultural studies, feminist theory and method, Latin American

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------76

gendered) other. It not only hides a situation of racial and sexual domination but mak[es] the task of denouncing it even more difficult - if not impossible. 20 As several participants in our workshops suggested, the problem of translating sexuality across diverse geopolitical contexts serves as a case in point, for depending on the community of practice, sexual categories, identities, and experiences do not translate easily or smoothly (the term queer and the challenges its translation into other languages pose come to mind here). 21 See Lugones (1997) for the notion of world-traveling.

feminisms, communication studies, feminist ethnography, and womens lifehistories/ autobiographies has appeared in Spanish, English and Portuguese. At present she is collaborating with the Feminist Transnational Translation research cluster on a book project on the travels and translations of feminist theories in the Americas. Her other collaborative project is a reader on Brazilian feminist studies.

Re fe r e n ce s
Ahluwalia, Pal. 2005. Out of Africa: Post-structuralisms Colonial Roots. Postcolonial Studies 8(2): 137154. Alvarez, Sonia E. 1998. Feminismos Latinoamericanos. Revista Estudos Feministas 6(2): 265284. Alvarez, Sonia E. 2000. Translating the Global: Effects of Transnational Organizing on Local Feminist Discourses and Practices in Latin America. Meridians 1(1): 2967. Apter, Emily. 2001. On Translation in a Global Market. Public Culture 13(1): 112. Azeredo, Sandra. 1994. Teorizando sobre Ge o nero e Relac es Raciais. Revista Estudos Feministas nu mero especial: 203216. Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics: Reflections on the Feminism/Postmodernism Exchange. In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Judeth Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser. New York: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter. 2000. The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translations of Baudelaires Tableaux Parisiens. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 1525. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Lo c Wacquant. 1999. On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason. Theory, Culture, and Society 16(1): 4158. Braidotti, Rosi. 2000. The Way We Were: Some Post-Structuralist Memoirs. Womens Studies International Forum 23(6): 715728. Brennan, Timothy. 2001. The Cuts of Language: East/West of North/South. Public Culture 13(1): 3964. BWHBC (Boston Womens Health Book Collective). 1971. Our Bodies, Our Selves. New York: Simon and Schuster. Caldwell, Kia L. 2000. Fronteiras da Diferenc a: Rac a e Mulher no Brasil. Revista Estudos Feministas 8(2): 91108. Carrillo, Teresa. 1998. Cross-Border Talk: Transnational Perspectives on Labor, Race, and Sexuality. In Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat, 391411. New York/Cambridge: New Museum of Contemporary Art/ MIT Press. Chow, Rey. 1995. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 1998. Off-center: On the Limits of Theory and Lived Experience. Ph.D. Dissertation. Urbana: University of Illinois. Costa, Claudia de Lima. 2000. Being Here and Writing There: Gender and Translation in a Brazilian Landscape. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25(3): 728759. Davis, Kathy. 2002. Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller. The European Journal of Womens Studies 9(3): 223247.

Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue

Claudia de Lima Costa

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------77

Dom nguez, Nora. 2000. Dia logos del Ge nero o Como no Caerse del Mapa. Revista Estudos Feministas 8(2): 113126. Franco, Jean. 1998. Defrocking the Vatican: Feminisms Secular Project. In Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, eds. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar. Boulder: Westview Press. French, John D. 2003. Translation, Diasporic Dialogue, and the Errors of Pierre Bourdieu and Lo c Wacquant. Nepantla: Views from the South 4(2): 375389. Friedman, Susan. 1998. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan. 1994. Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity. In Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gunew, Sneja. 2002. Feminist Cultural Literacy: Translating Differences, Cannibal Options. In Womens Studies on Its Own, ed. Robyn Wiegman, 4765. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. When Was The Post-colonial? Thinking at the Limit. In The PostColonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. New York: Routledge. Heilborn, Maria Luiza and Bila Sorj. 1999. Estudos de Ge nero no Brasil. In O Que Ler na Cie ncia Social Brasileira. Sa o Paulo: Anpocs. Hollanda, Helo sa Buarque de. 1998. The Law of the Cannibal or How to Deal with the Idea of Difference in Brazil, http://acd.ufrj.br/pacc/literaria/paper1helo.html. Jardine, Alice. 1988. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. John, Mary E. 1996. Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press. King, Katie. 2001. Productive Agencies of Feminist Theories: The Work It Does. Feminist Theory 2(1): 9498. Knapp, Gudrun-Axeli. 2005. Race, Class, Gender: Reclaiming Baggage in Fast Travelling Theories. European Journal of Womens Studies 12(3): 249265. Lugones, Maria. 1997. Playfulness, World-Traveling, and Loving Perception. In Feminist Social Thought: A Reader, ed. Diana T. Meyers, 148159. New York: Routledge. Machado, Lia Zanotta. 1997. Estudos de Ge nero: Para Ale m do Jogo entre Intelectuais e Feministas. In Ge nero Sem Fronteiras, ed. Mo nica Raisa Schpun, 93140. Floriano polis: Editora Mulheres. Mani, Lata. 2003. Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception. In Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, eds. Carole R. McCann and Kim Seung-Kyung, 364377. New York: Routledge. Masiello, Francine. 2000. Conhecimento Suplementar: Queering o Eixo Norte/Sul. Revista Estudos Feministas 8(2): 4962. Miller, J. Hillis. 1996. Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth. In The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, eds. Sanford Burdick and Wolfgang Iser, 207223. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Modleski, Tania. 1991. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge.

latino studies - 4:12 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------78

Mohanty, Chandra T. 1987. Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience. Copyright 1: 3044. Moya, Paula M.L. 2002. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moya, Paula M.L., and Michael R. Hames-Garc a, eds. 2000. Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schutte, Ofelia. 2000. Cultural Alterity: Cross-cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts. In De-centering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, eds. Uma Narayam and Sandra Harding, 4766. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, Joan W. 1988. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Shih, Shu-Mei. 2002. Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounter, or When Does a Chinese Woman Become a Feminist? Differences 13(2): 90126. Shohat, Ella. 2002. Area Studies, Gender Studies, and the Cartographies of Knowledge. Social Text 72(20.3): 6778. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1992. The Politics of Translation. In Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, eds. Miche ` le Barrett and Anne Phillips, 177200. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stacey, Judith. 1988. Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Womens Studies International Forum 11(1): 2127. Stam, Robert. 2001. Cultural Studies and Race. In A Companion to Cultural Studies, ed. Toby Miller, 471489. Oxford: Blackwell. Stone-Mediatore, Shari. 2000. Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of Experience. In Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, eds. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding, 110127. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thayer, Millie. 2000. Traveling Feminisms: From Embodied Women to Gendered Citizenship. In Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, eds. Michael Burawoy, Joseph A. Blum, Sheba George, Zsuzsa Riain, Gille, Teresa Gowan, Lynne Haney, Maren Klawiter, Steven H. Lopez, Sea n O Millie Thayer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thayer, Millie. 2001. Transnational Feminism: Reading Joan Scott in the Brazilian Serta o. Ethnography 2(2): 243271. Tsing, Ana. 1997. Transitions as Translations. In Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics, eds. Joan Scott, Cora Kaplan and Debra Keates, 253272. New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards and Ethics of Difference. New York: Routledge.

Latino Studies (2006) 4, 6278. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600185

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.