Introduction
People’s Minds Are Hard to Change

People’s minds are hard to change. When we encounter a new idea, we compare it to things in the world we already know, and that world—the one we navigate through every day—already makes sense. It is fully formed, and even if an outside viewer might say it’s faulty, it seems complete to us. There are no loose ends, and new ideas clash with its completeness. To make sense of them, we ask whether they fit in the world we know, but because they’re new, they might not. The problem isn’t the new idea—it’s the persuasiveness of the world we have come to know and take for granted.¹

This book is about how to change people’s minds. It takes as its starting point two related observations. First, in our modern world, we are faced with tremendous challenges—intense social and political polarization, the looming threat of terror, and the reality of systemic discrimination, to name only a few. Second, these challenges have at least one thing in common: however wide the range of factors that have brought them about, they are all supported by some people’s interpretations of the world, interpretations that cause them to act in ways that perpetuate the challenges we face. At the same time, not everyone sees the world the same way. People’s minds can be changed. We must ask how the factors that shape these challenges come to have meaning, and then recognize that ultimately meaning is not static. It can be contested. Our goal is to engage in that process of contesting meaning, and this book is one way to achieve it. It is about shifting people’s perspectives—our perspectives—so that the world we already know appears a bit off. That is, it is about shaking up the world we know so we can see what an outside viewer can see but we cannot. The tool to make this possible is cultural translation.

What is cultural translation? It is a term that means a lot of things to a lot of people.² To anthropologists, it is a way to explain a foreign culture to their readers. In the 1950s, for instance, British social anthropologists viewed the “problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own.”³ By the 1980s, anthropologists had grown more reflexive, as books such as Writing Culture showed.⁴ They began to address the Eurocentric biases in such observations, leading critics such as Edward Said to write that the “native point of view . . . is not an ethnographic fact only, is not a hermeneutical construct primarily or even principally; it is in large measure a continuing, protracted, and sustained adversarial resistance to the discipline and the praxis of anthropology.”⁵

Such critiques contributed to a different sense of the term, one more current in postcolonial studies, where it has come to describe a way to draw the logic of colonialism into question. Homi Bhabha, for instance, sees potential in the ways that immigrants introduce something new or foreign into the realm of the familiar as they live their “culture of the ‘in-between’, the minority position, [which] dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability.”⁶ In this way, for people like Bhabha, cultural translation holds the potential of challenging fixed notions of identity, especially in multicultural societies in Europe and North America.

To me, cultural translation means something more specific, and the definition I employ offers one possible synthesis of earlier notions by showing how taking others on their own terms can lead people to see their own identity in a new way. Cultural translation, as I describe it in this book, is a way to come to understand an object or text whose meaning derives from a shared interpretation of the world. It takes place through conversation and exchange.

Consider an illustration. Two people meet, and the first is interested in an object the second carries (figure 1). “What is that?” asks the first. “It’s an X,” says the second. “We use it when we do Y.” “Neat,” says the first, “that sounds like when we do Z.” “Not exactly,” answers the second, “it’s more like this.” Through such an exchange, the first person, substituting familiar references for the object in question, comes to understand (at least in an approximate way) how the second makes sense of it. In other words, cultural translation is a form of a give-and-take over meaning, or as I describe it elsewhere, in ways more in line with my scholarly argot, a semiotic economy where signs are exchanged for other signs on a basis negotiation rather than equivalence.⁷ What makes it translation is the way we substitute one sign for another. What makes it cultural is the way the objects whose meaning we are trying to discover are shared among members of different communities (although boundaries between communities might not be clearly marked). The type of cultural translation I am most interested in has clear ethical implications. It must, as Sarah Maitland insists, “have as its primary objective nothing short of the transformation of human hearts and minds.”⁸

How do we reach this high bar? I propose that we engage in acts of wilful and strategic misreading. As I describe in the following sections, I’m writing to teachers and students. Our task is to return to the work of thinking, to reclaim our engagement with ideas. This task is complicated (and enriched) by the double status of cultural translation in this book: it is our primary object of study, but it also provides a mode of inquiry. That is, we can ask about the tools people use to arrive at a shared understanding of an object, and we can use those tools to understand the object of cultural translation itself. This reflexivity in turn opens up the question of what it means to communicate. There is no more fundamental theoretical question than this, and in this respect, this book has a second area of focus, namely communication theory.

In the next sections, I talk about my audiences, and I untangle the relationship between the fields of translation studies and communication. Then I describe how teaching and research are two sides of the same coin and how they impose their own strategies to cultivate and refine the skills of purposeful reading. These strategies lead me finally to the idea of the parallax view, or the shift in perspective that makes wilful misreading possible. It is the parallax view that, ultimately, makes it possible to appreciate the art of communication in a polarized world.

Who Are We? What Is Our Role?

I want to be clear about something. When I say “we,” it’s not an abstraction. I mean real people leading real lives. What we’re doing is theory, and we’re doing it with the practical goal of changing people’s minds by helping them shift perspective so that different facets of the world they know appear. In that respect, this is not a conventional book. It’s an experiment. We will play—I will play—with tone and registers, and there will be lots of pictures. I argue (in chapter 1) that communication is always translation because we are always substituting one sign for another, and I want to substitute (among other things) pictures for words. I also argue that communication is rooted in the contingent moment. I am not an objective reporter. You (yes, you) are not a neutral observer. My first draft of this book was not a book at all. It was a series of lectures, complete with slides, that I delivered as part of a class (and will probably deliver again next semester). This is why, in this book, we are inextricably imbricated in indexicals, words that point to people or places or moments in time—“you,” “I,” “there,” “here,” “then,” “now.” Our relationship is real, even if temporally complicated. (My right now is not your right now. I am imagining you, future reader, imagining me, where my present is your past.) This guide is tactical only as long as we remember that relationship.

In other words, this book has a second purpose in addition to exploring cultural translation. It is a teaching tool, and it is addressed to a very specific audience: professors and students (specifically in cultural studies and translation studies). I am a professor. I have been teaching for a decade and a half. Right now I teach at the University of Ottawa. I was also once a student. I earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of North Dakota (where, much later, I was also a professor), a master’s at York University in Toronto, and a PhD at the University of Wisconsin. Why do I include these personal details? Because I am not talking to students or professors in an abstract sense. I am talking to my colleagues and friends, and I am talking to my students. I am concerned that, under pressure from politicians and corporations to turn university education into workforce training, we run the very real risk of abdicating our responsibility to train people to think or to do the work of thinking ourselves. Thus when I talk of students and professors, I don’t want to make airy pronouncements about the university and society. I want to call for a return to the hard work of thinking. (If you’re my student, remember—I am talking to you.) That’s who we are. That’s our role.

What is this work? Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno give us some sense of it in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” when they talk about competing notions of artistic style. In a broad sense, they argue that the culture industry tells us what to think and how to feel. (By culture industry they mean the capitalists who sell us entertainment and shape how we understand the world.) Of course, we don’t like to be told these things, and we flatter ourselves to believe that even if others can be duped, we cannot. But the culture industry is pernicious: it tricks us into thinking it’s our idea to feel the way it wants us to feel. We trade real thinking for ersatz thinking. In the case of style, we trade an older concept for a newer, flatter one. In the past, style described the form an artist’s statement took in the face of the world as its forces overwhelmed and negated her or him. It was individual and irreproducible. In contrast, style in contemporary culture describes the routinized elements that act like an artist’s “brand.” It is rule-bound and predictable. The culture industry banks on the fact that we consumers value consistency: we want to know what we’re getting before we pay for it. In contrast, the work we teachers and students must do—the work I hope to encourage with this book—is to return to the type of engagement that produced the older form of artistic style.

You could raise objections, of course. If you’re feeling ungenerous, you might say that professional academics like me are members of the worrying class. Our job is to generate alarm and then offer the very classes people should take to overcome their myopia. It’s a cynical racket. We diagnose a problem people didn’t even know they had and then sell them the tools to solve it.

But we needn’t look to cynical scholars for this type of critique. A. O. Scott, film critic for the New York Times, wrote in a review of the Adam Sandler movie Funny People, in which Sandler’s face is superimposed on a baby’s body, that “there may be no more incisive rendering of Hollywood’s self-image, and perhaps no truer, more damning mirror held up to the audience” than “that alarming man-baby, with the braying voice and the 5 o’clock shadow affixed to a pale, flabby, diaper-wrapped trunk.” He goes on to say,

Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.⁹

It’s a powerful indictment.

There’s a second objection to raise, one that comes from scholars themselves. If the field of cultural studies has taught us anything in the last three or four decades, it’s that we should beware of these tales of gloom and doom. Audiences are active. We’re not dupes. The media don’t crack open our heads and dump in their content. Instead, we’re active readers of different texts. We bring our experience to what we see and hear, and we interpret it through a lens that is partially of our own making, partially a function of our class, gender, race, and so on. We exercise our agency in constant tension with the world around us: even as our choices are constrained by the relations of power that link us to other people and groups, we still have choices to make. (Notably, this is the argument Stuart Hall makes in his essay “Encoding/Decoding,” the subject of chapter 1.)

Still, people are susceptible to the persuasion of advertising, which tells us we’ll be happy if only we buy the right deodorant or eat the right breakfast cereal. We are susceptible to fake news, or at the very least, to politicians who flatter us and tell us just how right we are. And, frankly, we don’t like hearing from people who disagree with us.¹⁰ In other words, our being duped isn’t a given, but neither is our resistance. What matters is the way we exercise our agency, even when it is constrained. We have the capacity to develop strategies for active resistance, but it must be cultivated. Hence our role as professors and students. As Pierre Bourdieu writes, “intellectual discourse remains one of the most authentic forms of resistance to manipulation and a vital affirmation of the freedom of thought.”¹¹ Hence this book.

Disciplining the Fields

I wrote above that I am addressing professors and students in cultural studies and translation studies. I hope others read this book, too, but if you know my audience, you’ll have a better sense of the context for my argument.

So what constitutes these fields?

My formal training is in cultural studies as a subfield of communication, but my principal object of study has long been translation, and I publish often in translation studies journals. I have observed, as have others, that there is little exchange between these fields: “language and translation have been systematically neglected in the current literature on globalization.”¹² Or “to a large extent, media, cultural and globalization studies have essentially ignored questions of language and translation.”¹³ Or again, “despite some early opportunities, translation and communication have had little to ‘say’ directly to one another.”¹⁴

Even when cultural studies and translation scholars do examine the same things, they often talk past each other. Translation scholars, for instance, have catalogued the many ways translators are influenced by the ideologically charged sociocultural contexts within which they work, nuances that many cultural studies scholars fail to see. Translation scholars, on the other hand, often overlook the complex and contradictory forms of influence that texts have over audiences, forms that cultural studies scholars have deftly explored.

For that reason, I hope this book will be an opening point for a new line of inquiry, one that puts cultural studies and translation scholars into conversation. But it is important not to treat these two fields (or their objects of study) as existing a priori. They are contested, and they cohere by virtue of the disciplining habits of their members. That is, they are relatively closed systems: what makes people cultural studies scholars is that they attend cultural studies conferences and publish in cultural studies journals. What marks those conferences or journals as belonging to cultural studies is that cultural studies scholars go or publish there. Likewise for translation studies. These venues foster conversations among like-minded scholars who share specific preoccupations that motivate them to examine similar objects. Over time, these fields have developed differently in response to their respective preoccupations, and they bring different lenses to bear on their objects of study.¹⁵

Still, there is nothing inherent in either field that would prevent scholars from crossing over. Their closure is only relative, not absolute. There are certainly translation scholars such as Susan Bassnett whose work is shaped by cultural studies.¹⁶ If we use departmental affiliation as an index of disciplinary affiliation, we also find a handful of cultural studies or communication scholars interested in translation.¹⁷ But they are the exception that proves the rule: the paucity of exchange suggests that artificially maintained boundaries remain. If this book serves to encourage conversation, it will do so by revealing the points where each field’s grindstones help sharpen the other field’s tools.

Teaching and Research

This book grows out of the years I have spent teaching in these fields. I’m an unrepentant theorist. I make my students read texts they think are hard. I ask them to read closely and carefully, a practice they often find foreign, and I ask them to make claims and stake out a position, a practice they often find uncomfortable. In short, I ask them to argue with me and with the texts we read.

But that approach presumes they understand the texts in the first place, at least enough to have a toe-hold, something to ground their interpretations. This skill can be difficult, but it can be learned. It’s complex and involves a range of tools, but the tools are simple enough. For instance, when I taught a master’s-level survey of theory at the University of North Dakota, I gave students three steps to follow. As they read each text, I wanted them to look for three things, which I put in the syllabus itself:

• What questions does the author seek to answer?
• What arguments does the author make in answer to those questions?
• What critiques of the author’s arguments can we offer?

On the first day of class, I explained that all the people we read had some question in mind they wanted to answer. Sometimes they stated their questions explicitly, but not always. If we could identify the questions, we could look for the answers they provided in the forms of the arguments they made.

Of the three tasks I gave them, the most difficult, I explained, was the third. Critique, in this case, means a wide range of things. Some possibilities include:

• Omission: what else might the author have included or discussed?
• External contradiction: how does the author’s argument differ from our experience or from what we observe in the world around us? How does it differ from other theorists’ observations?
• Internal contradiction: does the logic of the author’s argument contradict itself?

I wanted students to look for internal contradictions, but good writers hide them well. If students couldn’t find them, external contradictions were valuable, too. In what way, I wanted to know, was their experience different from what the author argued? And if that was too hard—if they found the authors’ account of their experience matched their own—they could always name something the authors left out. No one, I said, talks about radio. Or almost no one. So if they were stumped for a critique, they could always use that, as long as they were prepared to answer my inevitable follow-up question: what if the authors had talked about radio? What would they have said?

This approach turned theory into a form of τέχνη or technē, the Greek word that gives us terms such as technique and technical, and that we might also gloss in this context as “learning-by-doing.” Theory is a craft, like learning to play an instrument or learning to paint. Better yet, it’s a process by which we cultivate and refine our understanding of the world by testing our explanations of the world against our experience.

I used this question-argument-critique approach for half a dozen years before seeing that there was something else—something deeper—going on. That approach taught students how to read strategically, but it didn’t say what theory was. So now I begin my classes differently. I define theory by giving students three axioms:

1. Theory is an attempt to explain our experience of the world.
2. If the explanation theory offers doesn’t match our experience, it’s bad theory.
   (2a. In the end, it’s all bad theory.)
3. We must refine our explanation to replace bad theory with better theory.

The first axiom is easy. We’re doing theory when we try to explain the world. There are many ways to explain things. Communication theorists span the epistemological spectrum, from positivists anchored in an observable, knowable world to poststructuralists who question the basic assumptions that ground any claims we’d like to make.¹⁸ (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks how we know what we know. It is concerned with evidence and the validity of claims.) I tend toward the more skeptical end of the spectrum: we can know the world only through the mediation of our senses. For that reason, I draw on ideas of theory that come from the humanities, rather than the social sciences. In the social sciences, the scholar’s task is to use the tools of method to discover something about the object of study. Research in the humanities—if it can be called “research” at all (“inquiry” or simply “scholarship” might be better)—inverts that task by asking the object of study to reveal something about the world. As John Durham Peters explains, “the point is less to illuminate” the texts we read “than to let them instruct us, by their distance and familiarity.”¹⁹ Consequently, as Jonathan Culler writes, theory in the humanities is interdisciplinary, analytical, and speculative (rather than falsifiable, as in the social sciences), and it provides a reflexive critique of common sense.²⁰

In light of these differences, we can’t evaluate humanistic theory as we do social scientific theory. Nowhere will we find p-values or statistical validity. Instead, we evaluate humanistic theory by testing our explanation, and when the explanation doesn’t match our experience, the theory is bad. Hence the second axiom. But let’s not be fooled. This axiom has a corollary: in the end, all theory is bad theory. That is, no explanation is complete. Theory always fails to explain something. Hence the third axiom: our job is to refine our explanations to replace bad theory with better theory. That improved explanation will also fail, of course, and we’ll keep refining and refining and refining.²¹ In this way, theory and experience mediate each other: theory explains the world we experience even as we test it against that experience. When I ask my students to argue with the authors we read (and with me!), that refinement is what I want them to do.

In simpler terms, the approach I try to teach marks a point where theory and practice intersect. To do theory is to understand (or explain) experience. We understand experience by practicing theory (in both senses of the word practice—“application of a trade” and “repetition of a skill”). And for me, the practice of theory takes on another dimension: it’s teaching. It’s leading students through these steps so they become second nature. It’s also learning from students about the nature of theory as technē. I didn’t start out with the question-argument-critique approach but instead developed it in response to the difficulties my students had when I assumed they understood texts as I did. I had forgotten what it’s like to read difficult texts for the first time, and I developed the approach by thinking about how I myself had first encountered them. Similarly, I developed my three axioms in response to the way students worked through questions, arguments, and critiques.

As a result (as I write in the preface), this book is not a textbook, but it is pedagogical. It is about thinking and learning, activities in which we professors should be engaged as much as our students.

The Parallax View

This book is about teaching and it’s about how to change people’s minds. It’s a tactical guide whose two parts are linked by the challenge of opening people up to the possibility of seeing the world differently. Many of my students don’t like theory (or think they don’t) because they see no place for it in their lives. They come into my class filled with dread that I’ll drone on and on about arcane knowledge that might as well be in a foreign language where they need to know just enough words to get by. My job is to help them recognize their unspoken assumptions about how the world works, in particular in relation to phenomena of communication. My job is also to help them see that their common sense understanding of communication is inadequate. They have been theorizing communication all along. It happens every time they explain some interaction where two people try to exchange information or when they try to persuade each other, to give two obvious examples. Inevitably, their explanations—their theories—miss something, and I want to provide tools to help them refine their understanding of what is going on.

In short, I want to help them observe something they might not have had any reason to observe before, namely their interpretive horizon, or those very assumptions that ground how they understand the world. (“Interpretive horizon” is a metaphor. Think of the horizon you see when you’re outside. You probably don’t pay much attention to it, but the things you do notice stand out because you see them against that horizon. It is in contrast to that horizon that they become visible. An interpretive horizon functions in the same way. You make assumptions about the world that are so basic you rarely think of them as such, but the things you do notice make sense because you see them against those assumptions or that horizon.) The task of cultural translation is the same: to prompt people to see what otherwise remains invisible, those basic conceptual building blocks that are so fundamental they fail to see them at all. Not that cultural translation is a type of education. To presume that it is, and to presume that I have some privileged view of the world, would be patronizing. Instead, cultural translation and teaching are examples of a broader phenomenon, that of our engagement with our own interpretive horizons.

I approach this task through the idea of a parallax view. The term comes from the Greek word παράλλαξις meaning “variant.” It refers to the way a set of objects looks different depending on the perspective of the viewer. Imagine you’re walking down a street, and you spot a cool mural painted on the side of a building. Between you and the mural is a pole and a large silver shed. You continue to walk to get a better view. The shed, because it’s closer to you, recedes quickly and no longer obstructs your view. The pole, which is farther from you than the shed but not as far as the mural, doesn’t appear to move out of the way as quickly. So you keep walking, and eventually it too no longer obstructs your view. The mural, the farthest of these three objects from you, doesn’t appear to move much at all, at least in relation to the shed and the pole. The three objects don’t change position in relation to each other, but your perception of them does. That change in perspective is the parallax view (figure 2).

This approach is useful for understanding a wide range of phenomena because we can walk around other objects, too, so to speak. Consider the heroes in Star Wars.²² We root for the ragtag team of rebels as they fight the darkly powerful Empire, which in its hubris has built the Death Star, a battle station designed to destroy entire planets. We identify with the rebels, as retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore did in 1977, when the film was first released: “Like most young Americans then, I saw myself as a plucky rebel, a mixture of the free-wheeling, wisecracking Han Solo and the fresh-faced, idealistic Luke Skywalker.”²³ But the truth is that almost everyone sees themselves in that role, even people on opposite sides of a conflict. Roy Scranton, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, writes of spending one Fourth of July “on the roof of a building in Baghdad that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s secret police.” He was thinking of Star Wars, and as he looked out over Baghdad, he came to see himself as he imagined Iraqis might see him: “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.”²⁴ Perspective is important.

This approach also helps us see why other approaches would fall short. Isn’t it presumptuous, you might object, to think we can—or should—change someone else’s mind? Wouldn’t it be better to explore how others think so we can find some common ground for negotiating meaning? Perhaps. But people can understand others’ perspectives and still disagree. More important, even to reach the point where they can find common ground, they must first see the world from a different perspective, to understand how their opponents—like them!—see themselves as the rebels in Star Wars, too. Cultural translation remains a valuable tool to change people’s minds. (We will revisit this point in the book’s concluding chapter.)

Strategies of Misreading

So how do we walk around ideas to see them anew? How do we come to see our world so it appears a little strange? We start by recognizing something fundamental about the texts we read.²⁵ We cannot know an author’s mind. We cannot know an author’s intention. Although the words the author has written might seem to represent her or his intention, they are open to interpretation. Words mean too many things. Or as Paul Ricoeur explains,

When I speak, I realize only a part of the potential signified; the rest is erased by the total signification of the sentence, which operates as the unit of speaking. But the rest of the semantic possibilities are not canceled; they float around the words as possibilities not completely eliminated.²⁶

If this is the case, then what can we know? We can know the words we have in front of us, words that are assembled into a concrete, stable form. And we can know what others have said about them (although, there, too, we can know only what they’ve said, not their intentions). In order to walk around the text—better yet, to walk around the ideas within the text—it is enough to offer an interpretation that is at once consistent with it but different from how others have responded. That is, our strategy should be to misread a text by reading against the interpretations that people have had before. We must misread strategically, so that misreading becomes a more sophisticated type of cultural translation. It is a more strategic type of exchange than in my illustration above, one that has value when one of the people in the exchange is resistant to the idea that things might be other than she or he imagines them.

That is the exercise I undertake in the rest of this book. In chapter 1, I misread Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding.” Hall was concerned with a common sense way of thinking about television, one related to the classic sender-message-receiver model of communication. He read against this model in ways that influenced the entire field of media and cultural studies, where scholars have spent a lot of time looking at how viewers decode television. I read against those scholars to arrive at a new interpretation of “Encoding/Decoding,” namely that every time we speak or write, we are in fact translating. We are substituting one use of a word (ours) for another (that of the person we’re talking to). This misreading serves two purposes: it simultaneously illustrates and authorizes the strategy I advocate.

Thus the first chapter focuses on communication theory in order to show how misreading can be a conceptual tool. The second chapter looks for theory in an unexpected place: George Orwell’s treatise on language, appended to his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. If my misreading of Hall suggests ways cultural translation can open new horizons, my misreading of Orwell’s book—not as a novel with a treatise on language appended but as a translation manual with a novel appended—shows how it can also close them off.

The chapters that follow are about how people have used these tools to induce a parallax view in others. Chapter 3 describes how they have used art to do so in constructive ways. It focuses on a Russian artist who shocks his audiences by subjecting himself to great pain in very public performances, giving them a new perspective to ground their view of the world (and changing the mind even of one of the cops sent to interrogate him). His tactic is conceptually simple: he asks viewers to reconsider their ideas about his actions, some of which break the law, in light of a different higher-order principle—to see them in the context of ethics rather than crime and punishment. Chapter 4 describes the opposite: it is about perspective unmoored. It is about the odd path taken by the phrase fake news after the 2016 U.S. election. In the days following the vote, the phrase described stories that were made up. People wanted to encourage others to pay attention real news—to things that actually happened. But the new president of the United States quickly took the phrase and used it to evoke something different. He used it whenever he disagreed with a story, creating a space of extreme relativism, where the criteria people used to evaluate claims about the world had less to do with evidence and more to do with whether they agreed politically with the people making the claims.

Finally, the last chapter returns to where the book began. It offers a metatheoretical account of the performative dimensions of my argument (that is, it relates the form of my argument back to the question, what is theory?). It proposes an epistemology of jumping in: if theory is a foreign language, the best way to learn it is through immersion. Even if we don’t have all the tools we need, necessity helps us discover them as we go. (Not coincidentally, cultural translation is also best understood from this standpoint.) It’s for that reason that throughout the book, I try to provoke as much as to explain. I give examples to encourage an inductive form of reasoning so students will do the work of connecting ideas themselves. Thus in the conclusion I look at the ways this book develops an explanation of communication and at applications of the tools it identifies. I want to help students see how theory encourages a parallax view of the world, not to mention communication. The final chapter connects the dots, from beginning to end, and then turns students loose.

1 Many of my students—my first audience in this book—will probably experience this challenge as they read this book. What I want to do is introduce ideas that currently have no place in their symbolic universe. They might not make sense, at least not right now, but I hope that by drawing attention to the challenge itself, I might help my students take a critical step back to see their presuppositions in a new light. This is not an easy task.

For the background literature on this phenomenon, see Janice A. Dole and Gale M. Sinatra, “Reconceptualizing Change in Cognitive Construction of Knowledge”; and George J. Posner, Kenneth A. Strike, and William A. Gertzog, “Accommodation of a Scientific Conception.”

2 For overviews, see Sarah Maitland, What Is Cultural Translation? and Kyle Conway, “A Conceptual and Empirical Approach to Cultural Translation,” and “Cultural Translation.”

3 Godfrey Lienhardt, “Modes of Thought,” 97.

4 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography.

5 Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” 219–20.

6 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 224.

7 See Kyle Conway, “Cultural Translation, Global Television Studies, and the Circulation of Telenovelas in the United States.”

8 Maitland, What Is Cultural Translation? 53.

9 A. O. Scott, “Open Wide: Spoon-Fed Cinema.”

10 See Jeremy A. Frimer, Linda J. Skitka, and Matt Motyl, “Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Avoid Exposure to One Another’s Opinions.”

11 Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, 11.

12 Esperança Bielsa and Susan Bassnett, Translation in Global News, 18.

13 Christof Demont-Heinrich, review of Translation in Global News, 402.

14 Ted Striphas, “Communication as Translation,” 234.

15 On this development, see Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”; Kyle Conway, “Cultural Translation: Two Modes”; and Susan Bassnett, “The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies.”

16 For example, Bielsa and Bassnett, Translation in Global News.

17 See, for example, Albert Moran, New Flows in Global TV; Ulrike Rohn, “Lacuna or Universal? Introducing a New Model for Understanding Cross-cultural Audience Demand”; Rainer Guldin, “From Transportation to Transformation: On the Use of the Metaphor of Translation Within Media and Communication Theory”; and Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed and Hernán David Espinosa-Medina, “A Clearer Picture: Towards a New Framework for the Study of Cultural Transduction in Audiovisual Market Trades.”

18 Robert Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field”; and Diana Iulia Nastasia and Lana F. Rakow, “What Is Theory? Puzzles and Maps as Metaphors in Communication Theory.”

19 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, 36. Peters is concerned with Socrates and the Bible in the chapter I’m citing here, but given the approach he adopts throughout his book, I like to think that he wouldn’t object to my expanding his point more broadly.

20 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 14–15.

21 Of course, we can use social scientific approaches to critique and refine our explanations. Sometimes the challenge is finding ways to overcome the incommensurability of different scholarly paradigms—social scientists and humanists have different ways of approaching the world, not to mention different senses about what constitutes evidence or the types of claims it is useful to make. But this humanistic notion of theory, grounded in the conversation of critique and answers to critique, opens up ways to work through that impasse. For a sense of what this might look like from a more social scientific standpoint, see Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field.”

22 George Lucas, dir., Star Wars (1977)—later given the subtitle A New Hope.

23 William J. Astore, “Can You Spot the American Military in Your Favorite Sci-Fi Film? Hint: We’re Always the Bad Guys.”

24 Roy Scranton, “‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence.”

25 My analysis in this section is indebted to Sarah Maitland’s What Is Cultural Translation?

26 Paul Ricoeur, “The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem,” 71.