Against the ventriloquism: notes on the uses and misuses of the translation of the subaltern knowledge in Latin America

Abstract

This paper will contrast two forms of translation of subalter knowledge in Latin America. On the one hand, in the last two decades, decolonial studies have attempted to propose an alternative way of thinking the continent by focusing on the knowledge of locacommunities.The translation strategies used by decolonial studies aim at putting the knowledge of subaltern at the center of a decolonizing intellectual project. On the other hand, long before the raise of decolonial studies, Bolivia became a stage of an interesting translation project involving indigenous knowledge. In the 1980s, the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA, Workshop of Andean Oral History) developed an epistemic process, whose main goal was recovering indigenous experiences for building new analytical frames. Translation was one of the guiding principles of this historiographical project, was used as a tool in the struggle of these communities for articulating their histories in their own terms. Because THOA is practically unknown in Latin American, its multiple contributions to rearticulate subaltern discourses through translation have been understudied. By contrasting these two translation projects, this paper will shed light on the uses and misuses of the translation of subaltern knowledge in the Latin American.