Robert Barsky, "Dirt, Filth and Bestiality: What we can learn about immigration by obscenity charges leveled against those who translated the novels of Émile Zola"

Robert Barsky, "Dirt, Filth and Bestiality: What we can learn about immigration by obscenity charges leveled against those who translated the novels of Émile Zola"

Robert Barsky (PhD, McGill) is Professor of English, French, American Studies, and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997, 1998), The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower (2007, 2009), and, new this week, Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism, all three published by the MIT Press. His other books include Constructing a Productive Other (John Benjamins 1994); Introduction à la théorie littéraire (PUQ 1997) and Arguing and Justifying (Ashgate 2001).

This paper will discuss what we learn about the problem of “otherness” from translating or publishing “obscene” literary texts, and then apply the insights to the case of welcoming immigrant “others” into new host countries. In both cases at issue is to introduce the “foreign”, be it obscene or somehow “non-indigenous,” and in so doing we are asking for the integration of something that stands outside accepted norms and codes of representation. In cases of foreigners and cultural productions “other” to the norm, we are dealing with ideas or people that "out of place" within the dominant discursive systems, and so both are can or must be relegated to marginal social and aesthetic spaces. The literary example will be the obscenity trial launched against Henry Vizetelly for his publication of Zola’s La terre, and the real-world corollary is the contemporary treatment of “illegals” in the United States.