This talk is about translation conducted in the shadows. Much of recent translation theory has championed visibility – of both the translator and the foreign – as an ethical stance against ethnonationalism. Our times, however, seem to call for a more tactical, covert inhabitance of the threshold between visibility and invisibility, so that difference may better evade insular forces of surveillance and expulsion.

Adhira Mangalagiri theorizes “stealth translation” as a translational practice that enables the foreign to slip through exclusionary borders through gestures that have usually been taken to signal translation’s failure and treachery, such as guile and guise, obscurity and concealment. Focusing on the heavily regulated and prohibitive China-India border, this talk plots an eclectic lineage of interlingual tricks, hidden identities, and secret codes captured in 20th century Chinese and Hindi texts as offering translational pathways for exposing and eluding mechanisms of border control.

About the speaker

Adhira Mangalagiri is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2023), which received the 2025 Anna Balakian Prize awarded by the International Comparative Literature Association. Her next book project studies the politics of visibility in translation theory sited at the policed China-India border. Since 2021, she has served as a General Editor of Comparative Critical Studies, the house journal of the British Comparative Literature Association.