Dictation and Appropriation: Translation, the National Language, and the Anglophone Subject in Postcolonial Pakistan

Abstract

This paper argues that the linguistic condition of the postcolonial world is best understood as a condition of dictation: language received from above, through a hierarchical structure of address in which the addressee concedes authority to the addresser before meaning is exchanged. Taking as its central case the imposition of Urdu as the national language of Pakistan (a language belonging originally to none of the country's ethnicities, enforced upon a multilingual population while the former colonial language retained its hold on law and prestige), the study reads the linguistic history of the Pakistani nation-state through the translation theory of Lisa Lowe, Naoki Sakai, Lydia Liu, Talal Asad, and Padma Rangarajan. It contends that the national-language project fails for the same structural reason that dictation fails: there is no perfect subject of dictation, and the difference the imperfect subject introduces into the transcription is where the possibility of appropriation begins. The anglophone writer, I argue, is precisely this imperfect student, the subject formed by a dictated language who converts the hierarchy of dictation into the agency of appropriation, and who therefore emerges not as a residue of empire but as its most sophisticated translator.

Keywords: Translation Studies; Postcolonial Anglophone Literature; National Language; Biopolitics of Language; Mimicry and Appropriation.