POSTCOLONIAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE OTHER EUROPE: LINGUISTIC RACIALIZATION IN A BORN-TRANSLATED SARAJEVAN NOVEL

In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Rebecca Walkowitz argues that translation, as a "thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device," is foundational to the contemporary Anglophone novel (4). In my essay, I use Walkowitz's concept to reveal the inter-imperial configurations and, by extension, racialization procesks that this display of multilingualism traces. The racialization processes introduced and reproduced by linguistic means are central to the experience of the minoritized characters featured in my archive. To this end, I analyze an epistolary novel entitled Sahib: Impressions from Depression (Sahib: Impresije iz Depresije) (2010) written in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/ Serbian (BCMS) by Nenad Veliekovie and translated into English by Celia Hawkes-worth. A series of English-language emails that the unnamed British diplomat ("Sahib") newly arrived in Bosnia sends to his lover in London organizes the novel. Its form introduces a literary partition by embedding a British intermediary who filters the figure of the so-called native, Sakib - Sahib's driver. In the epilogue, a translator figure within the fictional frame of the novel notes that the emails have been translated from English to BCMS, unsettling the primacy and authority of the Englishman. In other words, everything the Englishman says has gone through a process of interpretation and negotiation directed by the fictionalized BCMS translator. It is thus the post-Yugoslav translator who mediates and voices a purportedly "authentic" Anglophone imperialist. Expanding Walkowitz's concept by being born translated into BCMS rather than English, Sahib invites attention to Balkan forms of postcoloniality and race. I argue that the multilingualism Sahib stages through translation gives form to alternative postcolonial frameworks that qualify whiteness through their dependence on language politics, racio-religious demarcations, and migration experiences-what I collectively call "forms of foreignness." A close reading of language politics helps challenge the supposed illegibility of race politics that constitutes an identifying characteristic of racialization in the Balkans. Moreover, as a function of what Laura Doyle calls "inter-imperiality," Sahib brings into consideration empires usually out. side the purview of postcolonial studies: the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the American Empire. These empires account for a complex racio-religious configuration involving multiple religious traditions: Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Judaic, and Muslim. Thus, while Balkan populations may be white, one discerns a racial discourse rooted particularly in language politics, which embed racio-religious markers and imperial legacies in the longue duree. The essay emphasizes the need to pluralize multilingualism through deep historicization and close reading. The work of Manuela Boatca, Anca Parvulescu, Maria Todorova, Piro Rexhepi, Milica Bakie-Hayden, and Laura Doyle substantiates the need to distinguish where in Europe and in which Europe the Balkans-and specific to this project, the former Yugoslavia and, more specifically still, the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina- are located.