Chapter 9 - Translating Postcolonial Affect

Summary

Affect Studies are arguably still dominated by Eurocentric assumptions and categories. There is a tendency to universalize the emotions rather than pay attention to translating across differing cultural contexts and languages. To what degree do we need to take into account other taxonomies of affect informed by other languages and cultures as providing alternative grammars of the emotions (linked, for example to aesthetics) that are quite separate from the prevailing European concepts dominated by psychology and psychoanalysis? Like the ‘psy’ disciplines from which they derive, Affect Studies are too often dependent on universalist and ahistorical conceptual categories. The chapter examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (recent Man-Booker winner) to ask questions concerning the translatability of affect. Is it useful, for example, to invoke the Korean concept of ‘han’ as an interpretive lens for considering Kang’s text or does this land us inevitably in cultural essentialism? As we open up our concepts to the world, translation will be an unavoidable foundational element.