Michael Cronin. Translation and Identity. Oxford/New York, Routledge, 2006, 166 p.

Building on facets of his previous work, Translation and Identity by Michael Cronin offers a brilliant rethinking of the conceptual basis for translation theory and practice in an attempt to account for the latter’s role in the era of globalization. As Cronin convincingly demonstrates, neither the reassuring binaries of modernity nor the well-worn paradigms of translation studies enable us to comprehend the linguistic and cultural complexities of the contemporary moment, the questions of identity they raise and the central place they must assign to translation. Rather, a whole new set of concepts and distinctions is needed to identify just what is at stake for the study and practice of translation in a post-nationalist world where traditional political, social, ethnic, cultural and literary boundaries no longer hold against the borderless flux of migratory forces, information technology, cross-cultural communication and neo-liberal economies. In chapter 1, Cronin poses a number of key distinctions that quickly lead him to offer a multifaceted definition of the central concept in which his subsequent analyses of contemporary translation theory and practice are grounded: micro-cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, micro-cosmopolitism is symptomatic of the emergence of a new cosmopolitanism that, while it contains many of the ideals implicit in more traditional conceptions, such as the “ideal of humanity as a collection of free and equal beings, possessing the same basic rights and to whom notions of hospitality, openness to others and freedom of movement are primordial” (8), nonetheless eschews the “perverse effects” these conceptions often produce. On the other hand, micro-cosmopolitanism provides a conceptual framework for better articulating and understanding the relationship between the local and the global, the particular and the universal, the self and the other at the core of contemporary thinking on translation. Indeed, the most powerful defining feature of micro-cosmopolitanism is its ability to at once reconnect the opposing poles that binary systems are so anxious to uphold, undermine the hierarchies that enable them to do so, and reverse dominant ideological and theoretical trends by arguing that “the same degree of diversity is to be found at the level of entities judged to be small or insignificant as at the level of large entities.” (15) In other words, a micro-cosmopolitan approach is one that operates from below rather than from above by situating cultural and linguistic foreignness, difference and exchange (read: translation) within the local, henceforth perceived in all its dynamic complexity, as well as its potential for interconnectedness and solidarity on both the local (inward) and global (outward) dimensions. It is an approach that simultaneously avoids reductive nationalisms, disincarnated, condescending macro-cosmopolitanisms and neo-imperialistic transnationalisms in an attempt to “define specificity through and not against multiplicity” (18), thereby offering a much needed alternative to (neo)liberal notions of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism. Synonymous with recently defined concepts such as global hybrids, mutable mobiles, quantum duality and bottom-up localization, micro-cosmopolitanism is based on non-essentialist, porous, interdependent conceptions of origin, belonging and being that, according to Cronin, best describe what is at stake for contemporary translators. In this sense, translation is akin to what Gerard Delanty has described as the cosmopolitan moment which “occurs when context-bound cultures encounter each other and undergo transformation as a result” (cited p. 23), thereby consecrating the “wave-like” connection between the national (micro) and the transnational (macro). As a mobilizing, transformative, cosmopolitan practice, translation articulates the fundamental characteristics of a micro-cosmopolitan vision of cultural experience and inward/outward interconnectedness, which in turn is a consequence, at least partially, of what could be considered one of the most important transcultural, transnational and translational phenomena of the late 20^th Century: migration. Chapter 2 focuses …