Joshua Price. Translation and Epistemicide. Racialization of Languages in the Americas. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2023, 189 p.

Joshua Price’s latest book, Translation and Epistemicide, is a timely, original, and astute addition to a growing list of recent interventions that uncompromisingly reveal the “dark side” of translation in our contemporary moment (see, for instance, Italiano, 2020; Samoyault, 2020). It explores how translation has been and continues to be an instrument of empire and colonialism through its participation in and facilitation of epistemicide, understood as a series of discursive, historical, political, and social processes, which involve “destroying, marginalizing, or banishing Indigenous, subaltern, and counterhegemonic knowledges” (p. 3). The book comprises an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The first four chapters offer four different examples of translation-as-epistemicide: 1) the commensuration of (incommensurate) languages and worldviews in the making of bilingual (Spanish-Quechua) dictionaries during the colonial era; 2) the marginalization of 20^th-century Peruvian theorist José María Arguedas within Western translation theory (in an apt comparison with the far-reaching legacy of his contemporary, Walter Benjamin); 3) the criminalization of Arab and Latinx translators in the present-day US; and 4) the assimilation of a vast array of creative practices in the Global South under the academic label “performance studies,” an untranslated Western disciplinary category presented as universal and capable of describing place-specific Latinx cultural traditions. These four chapters are equally detailed and instructive, and Price’s writing is always clear and precise as he connects a series of specific, tangible, and diverse translation (or non-translation) practices with the broader phenomenon of epistemicide. Considered together, the examples provided in each chapter give an excellent overview of the kinds of practices that can function as epistemicide. Because the examples are varied and wide-ranging, the book calls upon its readers to creatively make connections and find their own examples of translation-as-epistemicide, in their own contexts or areas of specialization. For instance, reading Translation and Epistemicide’s first chapter, “Colonization and Commensuration: Asymmetries in the Making of Bilingual Dictionaries” while consulting bilingual dictionaries from the colonial era can prove very useful in that it equips the researcher with a new understanding of the limits of traditional colonial approaches and methods. Price’s masterful illustration of how bilingual dictionaries operated as a technology of epistemicide during the colonial period enabled this reviewer to approach, for example, Reverend Silas Tertius Rand’s Dictionary of the Language of the Mi’kmaq Indians (1888) much more critically. In fact, the dictionary’s word-for-word equivalents of English words in Mi’kmaw give us but a limited, flattened, and impoverished portrait of the Mi’kmaw language and worldview refracted through a colonial lens. Many researchers will likely find Price’s insights useful and applicable, since the areas covered in the book are wide-ranging. Part of Price’s success in constructing a monograph that will speak to a wide range of scholars, both in translation studies and other disciplines, is due to the fact that he always connects his analyses of examples of translation (which can sometimes be highly lexical and semantic, in the case of the word “performance” and its possible translations into Spanish, or in the case of the refusal to translate the Arabic word “jihad” in US courts) to the broader, dominant, imperial structures of thinking with which so many scholars and translators are struggling, at least in the Americas and in former as well as contemporary colonial empires. In Price’s own words, “[t]o see translation in terms of epistemicide is to move beyond a narrowly aesthetic, lexical, and semantic analysis of textual translation to include analysis of an array of political, historical, material and even ontological conditions that surround the translation” (p. 12). This move away from strictly aesthetic or text-based analysis, as well as …