by David Roberts

Peter Beilharz captures this ongoing process of exchange, fed by the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas between the old and the new worlds, between metropolitan centre and open frontier in terms of cultural traffic. Cultural traffic in turn can be understood both in the direct and wider sense as translation. As the act of relocation, transformation and recreation, translation epitomizes the idea of supplementarity and in turn the question of identity. In the following, I shall be thinking with and against Peter’s thinking of the Antipodes with the idea of translation in mind.