Involuntary Dissent: The Minority Voice of Translingual Life Writers

Abstract

With reference to Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (1989) and four other texts I examine how translingual writers represent experiences of bringing what Hoffman calls 'terms from elsewhere' into dominant cultural dialogues. Alongside Hoffman's memoir I consider Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov's Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrenie (1985), Indian-born US writer Ginu Kamani's Code Switching (2000), Russian-born Australian journalist Irene Ulman's Playgrounds and Battlegrounds (2007) and French-Australian novelist Catherine Rey's To Make a Prairie it Takes a Clover and One Bee (2013). For all the diversity of translingual trajectories these 5 texts represent, there are conspicuous parallels between their accounts of speaking in a 'minority voice'. My focus is on experiences of involuntary dissent, a form of ambivalent group membership, which constitutes a significant and critically overlooked aspect of translingual identity.