2 - Frankfurt versus Atlanta

Summary

This chapter broadens the notion of linguistic difference to trace the impact of a collective of political translation focusing on race-, gender-, and class-based differences. I begin with an analysis of the US Social Forum (USSF), the most diverse face-to-face forum for civic deliberation about global justice and inequality in the US thus far at the time of this study. In 2003, misunderstandings related to issues of race debilitated the first attempt to organize a USSF, a political crisis which ended cooperation between locally-based grassroots global justice groups, who mobilized immigrants, minorities and poor people, and professionalized national NGOs and movement organizations. However, this crisis inspired a critical collective of political translation. In an exceptional move, (minority) linguistic translators and cultural intermediaries who had tried to reconnect the divided factions came together from across the US to accomplish the creation of a nationwide social movement coalition, the USSF. Indeed, my ethnographic comparison shows how these political translators’ critical interventions during national meetings helped resolve internal crises about finances, ideology, and identity, which dramatically failed in my nationally-based cases in Europe. This chapter shows how political translation helped movement coalitions survive internal communication breakdowns and collapse, as well as broaden their outreach.