Another Kind of Relation : Translation, Creative-Critical Practice, and the Decolonization of Critique

Grass, Delphine (2025) Another Kind of Relation : Translation, Creative-Critical Practice, and the Decolonization of Critique. Quaderna, 8. ISSN 2507-2811

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Abstract

What kind of translation is an academic essay? This article explores creative-critical writing as a form of critical interrogation of academic writing, focusing on the processes of extraction, transformation and authority which are signified in its institutionalisation. Drawing on Chakrabarty’s theory of translation and colonial power, as well as recent reconceptualization of language as a multimodal faculty, I argue that a too rigid translational direction of the essay in arts and cultural studies (from practice to writing) erases different cultural systems of symbolic representation by privileging anglo-European knowledge systems. Through detoured analysis of Matthew Arnold’s writings on translation and critique, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” I offer a decolonising reading of creative-critical practice which, by decentring European academic language, can offer more intentional translational models of critical engagement in the arts and humanities.