“Indian Diasporic Aesthetics as a Form of Translation” in Indiascapes. Images and Words from Globalised India. Anglistica, R. Ciocca e M. Laudando (eds)

Desi creativity, although exclusively produced in one “source” language – that is English, in order to make the wide and multicultural audience appreciate its diasporic, dialogic and polyphonic art, seems to be relying on some techniques typically used in translation. Translation studies have indeed recognized that in every act of translation the source text is inevitably transformed. This form of transformation in postcolonial productions is mainly realized by the employment of several linguistic devices such as the mixture of different accents, norm-deviant syntax, code-switching, code-mixing, or alternative forms of collocations with the aim of representing the lives and adventures of diasporic characters who, rather than speaking English, are portrayed as dubbed or translated into English. In cross-cultural translation, the very word translation comes to inhabit the space of language itself which constitutes an “in-between” zone, challenging, at the same time, the American and the Indian cultures. The “in-betweenness” here refers to different types of English, different accents representing the centre and margins of the world, but also to the clash between English and non-English semiotic systems. Therefore, new questions are inevitably raised about the original and the adapted version, the source and the target, the text and the context, the content and form of Desi productions. The paper focuses on some Desi creative features employed to de-colonize culture from both the Western ex-colonizers and the more ‘traditional’, national or even post-national cultures which deny the importance of hybrid productions by marginalizing them. A linguistic analysis of Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2007) is aimed at decoding typical Desi media practices and discourse(s) as new forms of narration in diasporic representations. Nowadays, these products seem to demand new kinds of linguistic and semiotic analyses which call for a somewhat vague model of postcolonial linguistics.