This special edition of Modern China Studies brings together articles that in various ways reflect on the relationship between contemporary visual culture within and outside the People’s Republic of China and the question of cultural translation. In recent years cultural translation (both in terms of the notion of translation of meaning from one cultural-linguistic set to another or others, and the effects on meaning of the shifting of cultural objects, texts and actions from one cultural context to another) has become a significant focus for transnational research, promoted institutionally as a key theme by research funding bodies and conference planning committees. The privileging of cultural translation as a research theme responds in large part to the increasingly conspicuous impact of globalization on contemporary societies and cultures, not least the shifting of economic and cultural power relations away from Western imperialist domination since the nominal ending of the Cold War during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Conventional reflective conceptions of signification have always viewed linguistic translation between cultures in problematic terms. While reflective conceptions of signification uphold the possibility of a more or less truthful correspondence between the noumenal and the linguistic, there is an accompanying acceptance of the non-equivalence of terms belonging to differing language sets as well as idiomatic combinations of those terms, and therefore the necessity for active translation to ensure accurate transference of meaning. Translation is consequently envisaged as requiring in-depth knowledge not only of the signified meanings attached to particular signifiers (denotative and connotative) as well as those relating to the syntactical/grammatical organization of signs, but in addition culturally specific values underpinning the structuring of language.

Since the critical-linguistic turn towards structuralist and poststructuralist conceptions of language during the twentieth century, thinking on the subject of translation has been problematized still further. Saussurian structuralism’s framing of language as both arbitrary and synchronic significantly complicates reflective conceptions of signification by asserting the constructed, culturally-specific and historically contingent nature of linguistic meaning. Seen in this light, direct translation between differing language sets is always subject to the refractive effects of the cultural-linguistic position from which the translation is made, which invariably skew the perceived meanings of the target language towards the translator’s values and prejudices. In short, there is as part of the process of translation an unresolvable struggle to see adequately beyond the limits of and blind-spots within one’s own cultural horizons. Crucially, such effects can be understood to involve asymmetrical power relations that render the values of subaltern cultures marginal if not invisible to their dominant others.

Derridean poststructuralism’s opening up of an interaction between deferral as well as difference between signs (différance) as the very possibility of linguistic signification presents yet more difficulties for translation between cultures. As well as resistance between differing language sets, there is as part of poststructuralism’s purview of language an additional sense that linguistic meaning is open to continual deconstructive re-motivation in the face of unfolding instances of signification (de/re-contextualization). Here, linguistic meaning is viewed as being susceptible to constant refraction not just between language sets but also within them. Although this problematizes categorical limitations on meaning and by extension the possibility of direct linguistic translation, it also suspends any outright closure between cultural linguistic outlooks. Also emphasized are the productive as well as negative possibilities of the refractive effects of the translation of meaning from one context to another. Cultural translation is thus rendered a fundamentally deconstructive action which rather than transferring meaning between language sets, performatively (re-)constructs it in potentially positive as well as negative ways.

The combination of this suspension of absolute difference and emphasis on the productive as well as negative (that is to say deconstructive) effects of linguistic recontextualization is central to poststructuralist-postcolonialist conceptions of ‘Third Space’. From a poststructuralist-postcolonialist perspective linguistic translation through the mediations of linguistic Third Space is a locus of potential resistance to asymmetrical relations of dominance by dint of its capacity to multiply the significances and therefore undermine the singular authority of dominant linguistic forms.

Recently, poststructuralist-postcolonialist conceptions of language have ceded ground to critical attitudes associated with the term ‘contemporaneity’. Key to contemporaneity is the notion that postructuralist-postcolonialism involves a self-contradictory assertion of the universal uncertainty of linguistic signification; one that has to boot signally failed to go in any meaningful way beyond the structural asymmetries it seeks to deconstruct. As a critical response to poststructuralist-postcolonialism contemporaneity, therefore, seeks to uphold a multi-dimensional conception of modernity embracing geographically-specific as well as de-territorialized perspectives on culture and language. For some this multi-dimensional vision is a critically necessary extension of visions of difference sustained by poststructuralism. For others, however, it has provided grounds for the upholding of more or less openly essentialist conceptions of culture in opposition to the latent imperialism(s) of poststructuralist uncertainty. In respect of which a contested contemporaneity may be viewed in part as a locus for an assertive hyper-structuralism emphasizing spatial difference and a granular attention to cultural and historical detail over a deconstructive interaction between difference and diachronic deferral. Such thinking is part of a wider demurral from a once dominant institutionalized poststructuralism that includes a return to materialist discourses in the wake of the global financial crisis.

In spite of calls for a critical contemporaneity by amongst others the present author, the contestation between spatially grounded and deconstructive conceptions of culture remains one without any clear or simple means of resolution. As an integral aspect of the conditions of contemporaneity, translation between cultures is inescapably challenging to essentialist as well as universalizing conceptions of cultural-linguistic significance. As deconstructive analysis demonstrates, plurality of meaning persists in relation to the textual minutiae and marginalia of such translations. Rather than providing grounded certainties of meaning, focused analytical attention to cultural and historical detail (a useful rejoinder to the formalisms and abstractions of institutionalized poststructuralism) remains a durable source of interpretative polysemy. This edition of Modern China Studies does not set out, either as a whole or in its parts, to resolve the current dichotomy between essentialist and counter-essentialist readings of culture, which is evidenced strongly by current debates surrounding the significance of contemporary Chinese visual culture. Instead that dichotomy, such as it is, emerges here as a complex and tectonically shifting field of intersecting discourses. Wherein perhaps resides the possibility of an active polylogical criticality beyond the discursively limited (and limiting) assurances of both a resurgent essentialism and an institutionalized counter-essentialism.

This special edition of MCS begins with Vera Tollmann’s ‘Screens as Faces and Façades: old order and new media - screens on Tiananmen Square in Beijing’, which seeks to analyse the significance of digital display screens in Tiananmen Square as a remediation of Chinese traditional screens and as 'furniture' for nation building. Beccy Kennedy’s ‘Outside Chinatown: the evolution of Manchester’s Chinese Arts Centre as a cultural translator for contemporary Chinese art’ traces the ontological trajectory of Chinese Arts Centre from its origins in Manchester’s Chinatown to its current location, considering how its purpose and focus have changed in relation to how it identifies and translates Chinese Art to local and/or global audiences. Kennedy’s article is followed by Huang Jian’s ‘Photography and Ideology in Revolutionary China’: a critical review’. Huang’s article addresses the discursive-ideological disciplining of photography and film production and reception in China during the revolutionary era after 1949 by critically comparing works produced by local Chinese photographers and Antonioni’s documentary film Chung-Kuo. The next article is Linda Pittwood’s ‘Parallel Realities: the relationship between translation studies and curating contemporary Chinese art’, which explores how recent trends in translation studies align the discipline closer to the practise of curating contemporary Chinese art in the UK. Following on from Pittwood’s article is Paul Gladston’s ‘“Besiege Wei to Rescue Zhao”: Cultural Translation and the Spectral Condition(s) of Artistic Criticality in Contemporary China’, which argues that contemporary Chinese art holds out critical possibilities that do not translate easily into western(ised) post-Enlightenment contexts but nevertheless resonate tellingly with the problematic consensual politics of neo-liberalism internationally as well as localised political authority in China. The penultimate article is Cai Shenshen’s ‘The Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Jiabiangou jishi): an analysis of contemporary Chinese reportage literature using the theory of totalitarianism and power’. Cai’s article critically analyses literary depiction of the Chinese-style totalitarianism of the Mao era, using Hannah Arendt’s theory on totalitarianism and Michael Foucault’s concept of the micro-physics of power to address how totalitarianism and political and social upheavals such as the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Famine severely affected many individuals by isolating, disciplining, punishing, and starving them via the system of laojiao (re-education through labor). The final article in this special edition is Thomas
J.
Berghuis’s ‘The World according to Beijing in 2008’. In this article Berghuis approaches cultural translation through the events surrounding the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, comparing the ‘spectacle’ of the 2008 Beijing Olympics ceremony to the 1964 production of the revolutionary song-and-dance epic The East is Red (Dongfang hong).