Found in Translation: Fiction, Lived Experience, and Translation as the Third Space

• In Event: Interrogating Decoloniality, Diversity, and Experience in Curriculum

Abstract

Employing autoethnography, I juxtapose the novels I have translated with what I have experienced along the way—fiction against reality—and argue that translation creates “the third space” (Rutherford, 1990; Bhabha, 1994) in my lived curriculum, a place where reality clashes into imagination, where hope arises amid frustration, where a little bit freedom is obtained in spite of all the restrictions and where I manage to battle the sense of otherness in the American South and use my cultural identity as agency for change and growth in life.

Author

• Yiming Jin, Georgia Southern University