Experts often assume that the poor, hungry, rural, and/or precarious need external interventions. They frequently fail to recognize how the same people create politics and knowledge by living and honing their own dynamic visions. How might scholars and teachers working in the Global North ethically participate in producing knowledge in ways that connect across different meanings of struggle, hunger, hope, and the good life?Informed by over twenty years of experiences in India and the United States, Hungry Translations bridges these divides with a fresh approach to academic theorizing. Through in-depth reflections on her collaborations with activists, theatre artists, writers, and students, Richa Nagar discusses the ongoing work of building embodied alliances among those who occupy different locations in predominant hierarchies. She argues that such alliances can sensitively engage difference through a kind of full-bodied immersion and translation that refuses comfortable closures or transparent renderings of meanings. While the shared and unending labor of politics makes perfect translation—or retelling—impossible, hungry translations strive to make our knowledges more humble, more tentative, and more alive to the creativity of struggle.| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Photographs Series Editor's Foreword Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Poems Aalaap PART ONE: Staging Stories PART TWO: Movement as Theater: Storylines, Scenes, Lessons, and Reflections Walking Together A Long War: Diary of a Battle: From Job Cards to Unemployment Allowance The Journey Continues PART THREE: Living in Character: "Kafan" as Hansa Nourishment Mumtaz and Budhiya Hansa, Karo Puratan Baat!: Based on Munshi Premchand's story,"Kafan" Entangled Scripts and Bodies: Theater as Pedagogy Hungry for Hansa PART FOUR: Stories, Bodies, Movements: A Syllabus in Fifteen Acts Prologue One More Time Synopsis and Backdrop Initial Keywords, Props, Premises Formal Outcomes, Expectations, Grades, and Assignments The Fifteen Acts Closing Notes: Retelling Dis/Appearing Tales Backstage Pages Glossary of Selected Words and Acronyms Notes Works Cited Index Back cover | "A brilliantly conceived, movingly narrated, and sensitively braided book. In it, the philosophical, theoretical, methodological, political, geographical, and spiritual stakes are high and concern the ethics and integrity of the poetics of political struggle, wherever that struggle might take place. Richa Nagar and the Saathis, Dalits, Kisans, and Mazdoors provide powerful fuel for a different kind of entitlement—the entitlement to justice."—M. Jacqui Alexander, author of Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred
"Written in Nagar's inimitable lyrical and theoretically provocative style, Hungry Translations invites and challenges us to participate in ongoing/unfinished stories and journeys of movement building across uneven social and epistemic terrain. The spiral movement of the text mobilizes and interweaves stories, bodies, and knowledges to rethink the process of translation as a 'telling in turn,' and a hunger for justice, rather than a straightforward 'carrying across of meaning.' Moving fluidly across three primary sites of movement building, political theatre, and classroom, Nagar imagines and enacts a landscape of ethical solidarity, introducing concepts like radical vulnerability, situated solidarity, hungry translations, and relational journeys of entanglement to map interwoven stories, campaigns, movements, struggles, and knowledges. A brilliantly incisive and original book that belongs on the bookshelves of all activist scholars committed to an...