The final lecture in our "Language and Power in the Middle East and Beyond" series.

Lecture Title: "Translational Justice: The Arabic Novel and the British Archive"

Abstract: Reading conflicting accounts of a single, catastrophically violent event, this talk explores how translation has functioned simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the critique of imperial law, and a site for theorizing extra-legal justice and redress. The “Dinshaway Affair” was a 1906 multilingual court case in which four Egyptians were hanged and many more flogged or imprisoned in retaliation for the death of one British soldier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial and proto-nationalist activism. The talk puts British trial documents in conversation with an Arabic novelization of the event – not to adjudicate between them, but to ask how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of translation, justice, and reparation.

Speaker Bio: Hannah Scott Deuchar is Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, where she works on Middle Eastern literary and legal histories, translation theory and practice, and broader questions of technology, culture, and language. Her first monograph, titled "Translational Justice: Law, Empire, and the Literary Archive," is forthcoming in 2026, as is a co-edited volume of translations titled "Modern Arab Thought: A Reader" (Cambridge University Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in IJMES, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and other journals and edited volumes, and has won the ACLA A. Owen Aldridge Prize. She is the holder of a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant and in 2025-6 will be a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

Discussant: Elizabeth Anker, Professor of Law and Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English

The "Language and Power in the Middle East and Beyond" lecture series explores the relation between language, politics, and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective, with case studies that range from Senegal to Indonesia, and from late Ottoman print networks to postcolonial literatures.

Sponsors: Klarman Fellowship program, Department of Near Eastern Studies

Co-sponsors: Comparative Muslim Societies Program, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Society for the Humanities