EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATION, MIGRATION, NARRATIVE

Abstract

Empirical, positivist approaches have long dominated migration history and migration studies and shaped these fields with their research questions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies. However, the data, interpretations, explanations, and narratives of migration and society produced in this framework have come under criticism in recent years. This critique includes challenges to methodological nationalism, the construction of migration as a problem requiring intervention and regulation, the production of sedentarism as the normal, the use of categories and concepts that place migranticized people in subaltern positions, and the reproduction of colonial knowledge structures by privileging Western perspectives.1

Decolonizing research on migration, mobility-induced social change, and diversity that considered migration societies (Migrationsgesellschaften) as the norm and understood mobility and migration as constitutive elements of the conditio humana took different forms and paces within different disciplines, in different academic communities in the Global North and South, and across the Atlantic and Pacific. It also led to a growing number of interdisciplinary initiatives. The reflexive turn in migration studies transformed vague critique at the margins into a dynamic drive for a paradigm shift at the center of migration research, demanding fundamental transformations to long-established epistemologies, power structures, and disciplinary traditions in this multidisciplinary, international, and often highly politicized field.2

Our own intellectual trajectories reflect these shifts. As historians of migration policies and societies, we began collaborating to explore connections between histories of labor migration in Europe (Christoph Rass's expertise) and in the United States (Julie M. Weise's expertise). As we worked, we realized that the largely empirical research methodologies on which we both usually relied left too much unexplained. We needed a better way to analyze the circulation of ideas about migration management around the Atlantic and beyond—not just among policymakers but also among migrants themselves. As we engaged with theories of translation on a broad register, we were better able to interpret the documents in front of us, but more than this, we were pushed to rethink the ways we narrated migration history as a whole.3

We were fortunate to enlist leading German and US historians and literary, cultural, and ethnic studies scholars to join us in this critical reflection and methodological and narrative experimentation in the interdisciplinary field of migration history. Our shared foundation is an understanding of “translation” as a broad theoretical umbrella that includes all activities transposing sensual data into tangible and communicable—that is, social and aesthetic—forms. Inspired by Alexandra Lianeri's June 2024 reading of Theo Hermans's Translation and History: A Textbook,4 we explore these concepts of translation as parts of a fundamental paradigm that can enrich migration research not just as a methodological tool but as a critical force in shaping social reality and producing the knowledge we study and perform.

Reflexive migration research demands a critical assessment of our epistemologies, our methods, and our roles as authors coproducing migration—or migrantization—through the choices we make while creating translations of the world into text.5 In her work on the reflexive turn, cultural theorist Doris Bachmann-Medick has highlighted how sociocultural and disciplinary frameworks and research practices themselves eventually co-constitute and re-produce the categories of difference that they claim to merely describe.6

At the same time, Bachmann-Medick has conceptualized translation as a transformative cultural practice that includes, but is not limited to, linguistic transfer. Translation is a continuum of ongoing acts negotiating and reconfiguring contested and contingent meanings across cultural, disciplinary, and temporal boundaries. It reshapes not only the original “object” of translation but also its contexts of origin and destination. This view configures translation as an analytical tool and metaphor for understanding cultural contact zones, power differentials, and knowledge production. As a methodology in practice, this equips us with a pragmatic model for navigating the complexities of interdisciplinary and intercultural scholarship. Understanding knowledge production as a translational effort makes ambiguities, hybridity, and contested meaning-making legible within a productive space for dialogue. This changes how we, as scholars, approach and analyze our source materials, represent the knowledge we produce, and do interdisciplinary research.7

Overall, this “Translation, Migration, Narrative” forum uses the framework of translation studies to make two principal arguments. First, we argue that theories of translation can point the way toward a critical self-reflexive approach to understanding ourselves, historians of migration, as not merely interpreters but also translators of history. In this endeavor, our authors have particularly appreciated the work of Thomas Nail, Theo Hermans, and Andrew Abbott. Nail's concept of “kinopolitics” creating the “figure of the migrant” demonstrates how the production of such figures, including by scholars, generates subaltern positions in a hierarchical social order and points out how translation becomes materially and politically consequential.8 Additionally, Hermans merged historical scholarship and translation studies by arguing for the inherent translingual dimension of the sociohistorical process, the study of knowledge production, and our doing knowledge while translating the past into history.9 Abbott has gone further to challenge disciplinary traditions privileging narratives structured by dominant choices and institutionalized practices; his “lyrical sociology” advocates for epistemological emancipation through his search for alternative modes of translating complex social realities into knowledge.10

Second, we argue that greater attention to linguistic and cultural translations, as found within typical historical sources, can yield penetrating insights into migrant agency and experiences that would otherwise remain hidden. We have found it particularly fruitful to draw on theoretical reflections and scholarship at the intersection of translation studies and postcolonial studies (for example, Paul F. Bandia, Homi K. Bhabha, and Mary Louise Pratt) in interpreting migrant archives and experiences. Both Bandia11 and Bhabha12 expanded translation from a linguistic process to a broader cultural process of negotiating meaning and identity in asymmetric colonial and postcolonial power relations. Whereas Bhabha stressed the outcome by focusing on hybridity and ambivalence, Bandia conceptualized the diasporic struggle for agency between being translated and translating the self. Indeed, this tension between translation as a way that society's most powerful actors (including scholars) attempt to control mobile human beings and translation as a way for migrants to engage in creative self-invention marks both dimensions of our forum's argument.

In the forum's opening intervention, literary scholar Laura A. Zander (University of Münster and Osnabrück University) theorizes from an analysis of Nigerian author Helon Habila's 2019 novel Travelers.13 She shows how Habila's novel brings to the fore the ways in which intellectuals (in this case, the novel's protagonists) translate lived human experience into a limited set of migrant “types”—or, in Nail's words, “figure[s] of the migrant”—that are legible to the surrounding society. Zander's essay challenges historians of migration to reflect on how our own practices inadvertently mimic this reductionism and to consider how our texts could instead function, like the literature she analyzes, as a “contact zone” between migrants’ creative self-translations and the legal narratives that objectify them.14

Building on Bachmann-Medick's conceptualization of translation as a cultural and analytical practice, ethnic studies scholar Catherine S. Ramírez (University of California, Santa Cruz) and historian Christoph Rass (Osnabrück University) explore in their forum contribution how “integration” is constructed, translated, and institutionalized in Germany and the US.15 Their approach, which combines translation theory with conceptual history, challenges the traditional understanding of the evolution of what “integration” means. They demonstrate how political, economic, and historical forces actively shape the meaning of integration, using it as a medium to translate individuals into “migranticized figures.” They also interrogate underlying processes of knowledge production and meaning-making as acts of translation that both regulate belonging and reinforce social hierarchies. Translation theory makes “integration” legible not as a neutral category but as embodying historical power relations that contribute to the reproduction of exclusionary mechanisms and the perpetuation of unequal power dynamics.

Three forum contributions, two coauthored by German and US scholars, then engage in interdisciplinary analyses and methodological experiments that focus on moments of linguistic translation to situate migration history as a “contact zone” between migrant agency and discursive and structural control by states and capitalists. These pieces show how translation can be operationalized as a mode of interpreting typical historical sources: migrant political expressions, archival documents, and autobiographies. Historians Albert Manke (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) and Fredy González (University of Illinois Chicago) use multiple theories of translation to reexamine the political self-representation of Chinese migrants’ sworn brotherhood organizations over a century and a half of diasporic evolution.16 In particular, the organizations’ strategy of self-representing as “masonic lodges,” and even shifting their visual iconography to reinforce this image, expanded their political space for operation and challenged outsiders’ representation of them as threatening. By following Hermans's thoughts on the fundamental power of translation to shape social reality, these moments of linguistic translation become, for Manke and González, ways of understanding the brotherhoods’ creative agency and the powerful constraints within which they operated in an era of overt anti-Chinese racism.

Cultural studies scholar Peter Schneck (Osnabrück University) and historian Julie M. Weise (University of Oregon) focus on a single 1954 document from the archives of the labor recruitment agency for the South African Chamber of Mines to conceptualize the archives of migration as repositories of translation.17 They look beyond physical mobility to see the ways that linguistic translation implicated the Malawian migrants’ “left-behind” family members whose translated words appear in the document. Bandia's concept of migrants as “beings in translation” creates a unifying frame for understanding migrants and their family members as part of a single process, even as analyses of two contrasting works of literature from the Mexico–US border point to the ways that Malawian migrants themselves experienced creative agency through translation while, for their family members, translation was primarily a constraint.

Historian Anand A. Yang (University of Washington) then reconsiders heavily cited migrant self-writings through the lens of translation.18 He shows how the testimonies of North Indian contract laborers Totaram Sanadhya and Munshi Rahman Khan disrupted official colonial accounts and highlighted migrants’ lived experiences as both “translated beings” (Bandia)19 and self-translators forging new identities (Bhabha). Language choices—especially in Hindi—and personal perspectives emerge as key to understanding how migrants translated experiences of suffering, their advocacy for abolition, and their diasporic selves into their life-writing. By complicating historians’ treatment of these rarely preserved voices, Yang underscores their significance for a deeper, noncolonial understanding of how marginalized communities shaped their own narratives and identities in global migration histories.

Even as the four middle pieces apply translation as a methodology to rethink familiar topics and sources in migration history, they also point the way toward critical acts of self-reflection for the historian. Indeed, just as German and US scholars, politicians, and bureaucrats, Chinese sworn brotherhood leaders, mine labor recruitment agents, and former Indian contract laborers engaged in power-laden acts of translation, so too do we as scholars of history. In the forum's final piece, literary scholar Kirsten Silva Gruesz (University of California, Santa Cruz) offers yet another provocation to historians of migration and their audiences.20 Whereas Zander's opening essay asks us to engage in critical self-reflection to push against our tendencies to order migrants as capitalists and the state have done, Gruesz's closing intervention asks us to consider entirely new forms of scholarly communication. Drawing on literary inspiration and Abbott's demand to move from structured narrative to lyrical representations of knowledge, Gruesz presents list, interruption, and assemblage as alternate modes of translating the migrant experience beyond “story.” Indeed, if the “figure of the migrant” (as conceptualized by Nail) is produced by a constellation of discourses, then the stories that historians tell are surely among them. Methodological case studies work in concert with Gruesz's call for new forms of translating migrant experience, together challenging us to find new possibilities within the inextricable ambiguities of our archives, narratives, and interpretations.