Description
Angola and China have maintained high-profile bilateral relations since 2003. Despite a rich literature on economic dependency and mismatched governance expectations, current studies largely overlook the nuanced intersections between infrastructure and body politics. Existing studies fall short in capturing the complex ways commercial and political systems intersect with the politics of the body. The more difficult task is really to make sense of the political in the individual, and vice versa, to trace how nationalist ambitions and infrastructural aesthetics are internalized, resisted, and enacted through translation. What is interesting from a research point of view is how political-economic regimes, material infrastructure, and people are thrown together in new worlds of meaning. Translators are language practitioners who mediate multilingual negotiations. Our research locates a site of entangled power in the foreign bodies of translators who are legitimately there but do not genuinely belong there. They are at once insiders from without, and outsiders from within. Research by Brian Larkin and others have explained how infrastructure materializes through human participation and a myriad of social and material forces, thereby displaying modern techno-politics and symbolic power. Building on this conceptual mechanism but recentering the discussion, we examine how investment and cooperation projects have politicized the bodies of Chinese translators in Angola, transforming them into a site of bilateral politics and engineering new forms of living. Employed by Chinese enterprises, a large majority of language professionals are – and will remain – non-residents. By approaching them as ‘hypervisible non-residents’ and framing their experiences as ‘emergent forms of living’, our research critically analyzes the body politics of translators who spend their youthful years in Angola without a reasonable expectation of becoming full-fledged community members. The ambitions of two states manifest doubly upon the translators – an extension, so far underexplored, of infrastructural aesthetics and ideologies.
