Scattered speculations on translation and/as repair

Abstract

While the idea of reparative reading practices (Eve Sedgwick) have been around for a couple of decades my paper is an attempt to speculate upon translation as a generative act of reparation (Gayatri Spivak, Emily Apter) while keeping visible the idea that ‘repair’ also comes to us from other, more ‘making’ disciplines like design. To do this I will engage with two recent theoretical provocations that I believe also serve as productive points of departure for thinking together translation and repair: Fred Moten’s take on repair and/as making, and Arturo Escobar’s decolonial arguments about rethinking the relationship between design and the humanistic disciplines.