Translating the Arab World: Contingent Commensuration, Publishing, and the Shaping of a Global Commodity By Elizabeth Anne Kelley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Charles Briggs, Co-chair Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Co-chair Professor Charles Hirschkind Professor Ramona Naddaff Spring 2014 “Translating the Arab World: Contingent Commensuration, Publishing, and the Shaping of a Global Commodity” © Elizabeth Kelley, 2014 Abstract Translating the Arab World: Contingent Commensuration, Publishing, and the Shaping of A Global Commodity by Elizabeth Anne Kelley Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Charles Briggs, Chair In the dissertation, I explore the translation, publishing, and marketing process of Arabic novels in English. My research examines how translations of Arabic novels are produced as a commodity within a globalized publishing industry and circulate in a highly-charged political context. In the process, these novels—and the individuals involved in making them—produce, resist, respond to, and incorporate ideas and representations of the Arab world in the West or English-speaking world. The dissertation asks what kind of translation is possible in a cultural and political landscape shaped by wars, sanctions, media stereotypes, and histories of colonization. In each of my chapters, I address the specific practices of translation, editing, and branding that produce the novel as a global commodity that serves as an interface between the West and the Arab world. My ethnographic research was primarily conducted in Cairo, Egypt in 2010, where I worked at the American University in Cairo Press, the largest publisher of translations from Arabic to English. While there, I conducted extensive interviews and fieldwork with translators and Egyptian authors. My research examines the broader context of Arabic novels in English translation as they circulate in the politicized public sphere of the West. How are political and social elements incorporated into the text through lexical items that index cultural ephemera? How do novels as contingently-constructed objects move and circulate? Translation, as I discuss it here, is a process that extends beyond the text to include the creation of equivalence across cultural differences, differing business models and histories, varying concepts of art and literature, as well as material differences that shape the production, circulation, and reception of these novels. In doing this, my work intervenes in the scholarly literature around globalization, transnationalism, and circulation in two central ways. First, I argue that translation is a kind of scale-making project that works to move between and reconstruct local and global spheres. Second, I argue that translation renders certain elements mobile and other immobile, enabling some aspects (of language, culture, experience, and so on) to circulate while creating others as fixed. In this way, translation emerges as a key site for thinking about the construction of the global and local in the contemporary moment. 1 Table of Contents: Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Part One Chapter 2: Designing Egypt: Transnational Identities, Contested Modernity, and how Texts become Books 29 Chapter 3: Of Memes and Mubarak: Imagining Egypt’s Future 50 Part Two Chapter 4: The “G” in “Gihad”: The Materiality of Language and the Ethics of Reading 73 Chapter 5: Spectacles, Heritage Tourism, and the Making of a Literary Ambassador 94 Chapter 6: The Imagined Reader and the Public of the Book 120 Conclusion 138 Bibliography 142 i Acknowledgments This dissertation has been the product of years of work and owes so much to too many people to name. As I finish writing, I am filled with such an overwhelming and deeply-rooted sense of gratitude to the many individuals who inspired me, supported me, and truly made this dissertation possible. I am incredibly grateful to the members of my committee, particularly the co-chairs, Charles Briggs and Stefania Pandolfo. As a first-year graduate student, I worked with Charles as a research assistant. Although I did not realize it at the time, this opportunity taught me in a profound way what it is to be an anthropologist and what anthropological research and questions look like. My understanding of the attention and approach an anthropologist can bring to the world has been shaped by the research I conducted with Charles and through the classes I took with him. I am also grateful for the care and attention he took in commenting and giving me feedback on the drafts of this dissertation. I have also been deeply influenced by Stefania Pandolfo. The questions she asks in her seminars and her writing have remained with me and shape the kinds of questions I ask and the style of my own analysis. I am particularly grateful to her for taking questions of aesthetics seriously and for valuing the pleasure and desire necessary for good scholarship. At key moments in this process, she reminded me not to forget or lose sight of what I loved about translation. This mode of Lacanian ethics motivated by desire proved wise personally and, I think, academically too. Finally, as the writing of this dissertation was nearing completion, and my attitude toward the subject was tinged with cynicism, she reminded me of the hope and possibility of translation that always accompanies the loss. I am grateful to Charles Hirschkind for his thoughtful comments, rigorous questioning, and for pushing me to think in a more careful fashion. It was also a pleasure to teach with him and learn how he framed complex anthropological questions to a class of undergraduates. Ramona Naddaff provided attentive and very generative feedback on the project generally and the dissertation specifically. I’m thankful for her engagement with these questions and for reminding me not to lose track of the text (that is, texts, mine and those about which I wrote). I am also grateful to Alexei Yurchak who served as the chair of my orals committee and provided formative guidance in the early years of this project. This research would not have been possible without the support of the American University in Cairo Press and the opportunity I had to work there as a professional trainee in the Editorial department. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to become part of the community there. The press provided an anchor for my time in Cairo and I treasured the camaraderie and collegiality I found there. The environment was congenial, welcoming, and intellectually engaged. In many ways, it was this professional home that got me through the often lonely process of fieldwork. While working there, I went from being an isolated researcher and student to belonging in a very real and institutional way. The legitimacy and legibility this provided was invaluable in conducting my fieldwork with other members of the publishing industry, at book fairs, and with authors and translators. At the press, I developed friendships beyond the scope of this project. I have drawn on my conversations and experience there throughout this text, and I hope that I have done justice to the liveliness of the discussions and careful attention to the process of book-making. I’ve not used real names, so I will thank them by the names that appear in the text. I am grateful to Tom and Christopher for providing me the opportunity to work at the press, to Amira for her ii introduction to the task of editing, and to Ahmed for introducing me to the work of the department. Furthermore, I’m grateful for their friendship: I enjoyed immensely the dinners I spent with Amira, Ahmed, and Wiam. Mona and Sara were generous with my mistakes as I learned the ropes and were kind friends throughout the process. The other professional trainees, especially Soha and Cherif, were wonderful colleagues and friends. This dissertation would also not be possible without the generosity of the translators, authors, journalists, and others who I spoke with. The time they took to discuss their work and to talk about the pleasures and problems of translation made this research possible in a very concrete way. In Cairo, I am indebted to my friends and colleagues who introduced me to the wonderful city and to friends and roommates who made my time there personally as well as professionally fruitful. In addition to colleagues at the AUCP, I want to thank Amy Somermeyer, Maia Sieverding, Laura el-Khatib, Amira Mohsen, Lea Jones, Sharaf, Ahmed Mokki, Hisham Nasser, Hisham Meghdy, Sarah Mishkin and Eva Tache-Green. I also want to thank Lissie Jacquette for organizing the Cairo Book Club while I was there. It was a wonderful opportunity to actually read and discuss some of these novels in a collective fashion. I have presented papers from these chapters at various conferences including the Annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and the American Comparative Literature Association. I am indebted to feedback from discussants including Ian Whitmarsh and Alex Argenti-Pillen. I delivered a version of chapter four at the University of Toronto. I’m grateful to Jens Hanssen for organizing that seminar and for his helpful comments on the paper. Funding for this project was provided by the University of California, Graduate Division, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship. Although writing has been a solitary process, it has not been a lonely one. I am so grateful to my cohort at UC Berkeley/UCSF. In particular, Eric Plemons, Xochitl Marsilli (to whom I’m especially grateful for getting signatures from my committee members while I was in Toronto), Theresa MacPhail, Liza Buchbinder, Jeff Schonberg, Martha Stroud, Anthony Stavrinakis, Emily Chua and Nick Bartlett were wonderful friends and peers through the whole process.