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Chinese Whispers

The chapter is presented within a portfolio that provides contextual information relevant to the research. The question investigated in Chinese Whispers is what happens to individual and group identity in the process of multicultural and multilingual transmission. These issues have been examined in academic studies which deal with the politics of identity and the conflicts and pressures of cultural translation, particularly when there are hurdles and

blockages in the passing on and exchanging of cultural elements (e.g. attitudes, values, beliefs and behavioural scripts).

These issues interrelate with those of agency and authority. The process of cultural translation is often a fight for supremacy - whose voice is heard, whose is the story, who owns the narrative? This becomes a matter of representation for subaltern, marginalised voices that are without agency because of their social status.

These issues are theorised by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and also by Dina Iordanova in Cinema of Flames (2001) and Cinema of the Balkans (2006), and a range of academic approaches to these questions are published in Guha and Spivak’s Selected Subaltern Studies (1988). In contrast to these works the methodology applied in Chinese Whispers was practice-based narrative articulation of the affective aspects of cultural transmission. The essay dramatises the tensions between cultural policy and creative artistic practice; its approach is to show the problems of cultural translation rather than examine them through traditional modes of scholarly discourse.

The new understanding of the problems of cultural translation that is produced in this way gives audiences an alternative insight into issues of cultural transmission - a kind of knowledge that is narrative rather than discursive. This pursuit of the affective dimension of translation gave the essay a unique position among the academic papers given at the ‘Writing in Many Tongues’ Conference at Groningen University, Holland.