Media Power and Activist Disruption: The “Arabian Street Artists,” Homeland, and transdiegetic translational activist narrative

In October, after the release of the second episode of series 5 of the American television show Homeland, three artists who had been hired to paint graffiti in Arabic on the set of the show to add authenticity revealed that the messages they had painted were part of a translinguistic activist “hack.” The artists, Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl, had used the opportunity to comment not only on the fictional content of the show but on the show itself and on the surrounding, non-fictional political realities. In this talk I examine how Amin, Kapp, and Karl use translation to manipulate the content of the mass media product, increase the range of the activist message, and collapse the narrative boundaries that are often used to create an artificial separation between the public and metanarratives constructed by fiction and those of the outside world, as well as narratives in different language communities. I then begin an exploration of how various articulations of power and power dynamics could be relevant to this example.

Dr Anna Strowe is a lecturer in translation and interpreting studies in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her work currently focuses on media forms and materiality in translation, along with translation theory.