Língua (inglesa), tradução e estrangeiridade: Representações discursivas e (de)colonialidade do saber em Babel (or, the necessity of violence: an arcane history of the Oxford translators' revolution) de R. F. Kuang

Abstract

The present work has as its theme the (de)coloniality of knowledge - as stated by Quijano (2007) - in ‘Babel: An Arcane History’ by R. F. Kuang. With this effort, it is expected to contribute to the understanding that aesthetic objects can perform as pedagogical tools, necessary for unconventional approaches of relevant issues from different areas of knowledge, and, in this way, so that perspectives previously excluded or marginalized be brought to light. To this end, this monograph used the bibliographic review to explain the “Aesthetic Turn” - a movement that argues the presence of politics between the represented and their representation -; the Decolonial Thinking - a theory that questions the Eurocentric canon of universal and neutral knowledge production -; and the Pecheutian Discourse Analysis - which conceives that there is no univocal relationship between language/thought/world, and, therefore, there are no preconceived and unique meanings. As a general objective, we proposed to investigate how the (de)coloniality of knowledge is discursively constituted in the book. More specifically, we intend: i) to identify discursive representations od (English) language, translation and foreignness in the work on screen; ii) discuss how these representations manifest the (de)coloniality of knowledge in the book; and iii) debate how the aesthetic object reflects and refracts issues and dynamics of a time and a society. With this, we identified representations of (English) language, translation and foreignness that are intertwined and sustained by discourses that reinforce and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge.