Daughter's Tongue: The Intimate Distance of Translation

In this article, I begin by considering ‘accented’ (Hamid Naficy) and autoethnographic film, video and installation practices, ie., work made by persons living in exile. I examine what is at stake in the intimate act of a daughter (the artist) visually and aurally translating her mother’s tongue (the linguistic formation of the daughter’s childhood and the language still spoken by her mother). I am specifically concerned with representations of psychical, geographic and linguistic displacements within these artistic practices as a means of understanding subject formation, gendered agency, and the politics and poetics of race and ethnicity.

During the past 10 years critical theories of translation have been used to discuss cultural practices within an international context. This issue of 'Journal of Visual Culture', co-edited with Mieke Bal, is the first to consider translation within the realm of the visual arts.

Working out of an interdisciplinary context, the contributions in this volume reconsider our understanding of medium, subjectivity, and nations as translative phenomenological, psychoanalytic, philosophical and postcolonial matters.

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