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Articles

Volume 38, Number 2 (2017)

Can Multilingualism Be a Radical Force in Contemporary Canadian Theatre? Exploring The Option of Non-Translation

Submitted
December 19, 2017
Published
2017-12-06

Abstract

Recognizing the richness of multilingual theatre in Canada, this article argues that the choice of non-translation as the absolute staging of multilingual hospitality carries the promise of a more radical cohabitation and offers both critical and reparative encounters with bodies that resist mainstream recuperation. Beyond multicultural accommodation of diversity, non-translation as a politicized choice is examined through examples chosen from contemporary Asian Canadian and Afro-Caribbean Canadian drama, as well as Indigenous performance. Specifically, the article analyzes the deployment of multilingualism “from below” (Alison Phipps’s term) in front of mainstream Anglophone audiences in such plays as debbie young and naila belvett’s yagayah.two.womyn.black.griots , Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue , and Monique Mojica’s Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way . The decolonial practice of non-translation embraced by these playwrights contributes to the trend of “diversifying diversity” and promotes more balanced linguistic ecologies. Rather than softening the hard edges of difference in a global spread of equivalences, multilingualism “from below,” associated with minoritized languages and invisibility, embraces radical heterogeneity and incommensurability, radically confronting the meaning of ethnicized, hyphenated multiculturalism. However, at the same time, these forms of multi-lingualism throw into high relief the selective cultural politics of translation that privileges Canada’s official bilingualism.