Through comparative readings of a single, catastrophically violent historical event, this talk explores how translation has functioned simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the literary critique of imperial law, and a site for theorizing extra-legal justice and redress. The 'Dinshaway Affair' was a multilingual 1906 legal trial at which four Egyptians were hanged and many more flogged or imprisoned in retaliation for the death of one British soldier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial and proto-nationalist activism. The talk puts British trial documents in conversation with an Arabic novelization of the event – not to adjudicate between them, but to ask how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of translation, justice, and reparation.

About the speaker

Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar is Senior Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in modern Middle Eastern literature, media, and translation; critical and legal theory; and histories of culture and technology in the Global South. She is particularly interested in South-South comparative methods, and in the intersections of literature, technology, and law.