“A Slight Knowledge of the Barbarian Language”: Chinese Interpreters in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America

Ngai,

doi:10.5406/jamerethnhist.30.2.0005

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…This perspective leads to interpreters being conceived of as "a conduit pipe" or "bi-lingual transmitters" (Laster & Taylor 1994, p. 79). Nevertheless, when this conduit model does not serve participants' objectives, such as trial attorneys' hopes for cross-examination, lawyers and others in the court are willing to see more linguistic complexity (Ng 2009). Ideologies from both interpreting and formal institutions-such as the prioritization of semantic over pragmatic equivalence (Angermeyer 2021), the preference for denotational meaning as an indicator of credibility ( Jacquemet 2015), or the prescription that a person must commit to one language alone (Angermeyer 2015, p. 137)-have been shown to create confusing and procedurally unfair interactions.…”

Section: On the Nature And Conditions Of Interpreting Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

Kunreuther

Rao

2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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In this review, we call for heightened attention to the labor of interpreters to think more reflexively about our own professional ethics and the paradoxes of global capitalism within which both interpreters and anthropologists work. Like other forms of communicative labor, interpretation is often devalued, unrecognized, and uncompensated—a form of invisible labor. Professional language ideologies, some paradoxically perpetuated by the profession itself, contribute to interpreters’ invisibility in their workplaces. Global and multilingual organizations depend on ideologies of transparency and the assumption that language transmission is easy; examining interpreters’ labor ethnographically troubles these assumptions. Interpreters also confront an ethical tension in their position that mirrors a tension in anthropology: namely, between ideals of professional neutrality and analytic distance versus intentional advocacy. The study of interpreters offers ways to critically assess anthropologists’ own professional practices and dig deeply into the contradictions of global capitalism. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 52 is October 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Section: On the Nature And Conditions Of Interpreting Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

Kunreuther

Rao

2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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“…Poblete's fascinating discussion of other intermediaries, from evangelical ministers to labor agents who served as translators, advocates, and recruiters, and were often paid or otherwise supported by the HSPA, strengthens a growing literature on the significance of interpreters and other cultural brokers in an imperial early twentieth-century U.S. immigration history. 11 Yet the degree to which these individuals demonstrated the power that Hawai'i's planter elite and the American imperial state exercised over these workers and their lives stands sharply in contrast to Poblete's claims that open colonial mobility and local leadership granted them agency. It may be true in a narrow legal sense that insular American territorial expansion after 1898 permitted these intracolonials to evade federal laws that denied U.S. entry to so-called Chinese "coolies" and other seemingly unfree migrants.…”

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confidence: 92%

Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers

Jackson

2017

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

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In 1915, as the Great War was consuming Europe and its colonial empires, W.E.B. Du Bois completed The Negro, one of the first comprehensive histories of Africa and its diaspora ever published in the United States. Overshadowed today by his more well-known writings, The Negro meditated on how “the problem of the color line” was nothing if not the result of centuries of global capitalist development dependent upon coerced labor, especially African chattel slavery in the Atlantic world. For Du Bois, peering back in time through the smoking ruins of total war, slavery's postemancipation legacies of political disenfranchisement, landlessness, poverty, and segregation had birthed a global proletariat of color exploited by white Europeans and Americans in an international order divided more and more along imperial lines.

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Building an Occupation: Puerto Rican Laborers in the Dominican Republic, 1916–1924

Wright¹

2016

Labor

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This article details US officials’ mobilization of Puerto Rican labor during the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) and the consequences for transnational working-class solidarity. It argues that the military government relied on Puerto Ricans as both imperial laborers and role models whose presumed cultural affinities with the Dominican populace would forestall resistance and contribute to efforts to reform Dominican society. Yet the rise of Dominican nationalist resistance forced Puerto Ricans to reconcile collaboration with their identity as Latinos and second-class American citizens. As they struggled to choose between conflicting loyalties, they were alternately labeled traitors to the United States or to their race. By the final years of the occupation, Puerto Ricans were condemned as colonial sepoys and abandoned by the very occupation they had helped to build. The article concludes that the Dominican case illustrates both US empire’s reliance on colonial labor and its limitations.

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“A Slight Knowledge of the Barbarian Language”: Chinese Interpreters in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America

Cited by 5 publications

References 2 publications

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting

Crossing Islands and Oceans in Labor Histories of American Empire: Capital, Commodities, Coolies, and Consumers

Building an Occupation: Puerto Rican Laborers in the Dominican Republic, 1916–1924

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