Creating New Languages of Resistance

Omid Tofighian is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His publications include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (2016) and translation of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).

“By merging together scholarly insights, personal and collective reflections, and activist interventions, this volume presents an important and much-needed conceptualization of engaged intellectualism in today’s world. Through an in-depth investigation of the interconnectedness of philosophy, translation, creative resistance and knowledge production, it re-affirms our faith in the power of alternative publics to bring about change from below; and in its stress on reciprocity, it opens up vistas for new forms of action and meaning-making. True to its proclaimed aims, the volume maintains a rare balance between scholarly investigation and personal, hands-on experiences in addressing the intersection between key issues such as Australia’s border and racial politics, the role of translation in resistance, and the potential of narratives to bridge carceral limitations. In a world still beset with various forms of coloniality, border violence, and social injustice, this volume is a precious enactment of possibilities of resistance through collective cultural production.” - Randa Aboubakr, Translator and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cairo University, Egypt“This book is a refreshing reminder that artificial intelligence will never be able to replace human thinkers despite the proliferation of artificial translation software that seek to instantly translate phrases and passages from one language to another in fast-food fashion. Users of such AI translation tools know that they are not smart enough because the nuances of the different languages are lost or misrepresented by mechanical artificial intelligence. In this book we are reminded that translation is not simply a mechanical linguistic activity but a politically charged act of defiance in the face of cruel murderous carceral-border-industrial complex necessitating the creation of new languages to hold state officials accountable for the enormous power that they abuse over the lives of vulnerable people burdened with intersectional bases of discrimination, exclusion, and incapacitation or death. Readers familiar with his multi-award-winning translations, especially the book, No Friends But the Mountains, consisting of interviews and collaborations with the then detained immigrant intellectual, Behrouz Boochani, will appreciate that book better after reading this new volume of essays. I first encountered the work of Omid when he contributed a theoretical essay to a special issue of a journal that I co-guest edited: Tofighian, O. (2020) ‘Introducing Manus Prison Theory: knowing border violence’, Globalizations 17(7): pp. 1138-1156. I recommend his new book to multiple disciplines that are directly and indirectly addressed in the philosophical discourse that the author has assembled here.” - Dr. Onwubiko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System, Routledge, 2018; and Counter-Colonial Criminology, Pluto, 2003, among other publications.“Tofighian has long undertaken activist scholarship in collaborative translation and critical narratives with people most affected by violent border regimes. In this nuanced and truly interdisciplinary text – spanning 25 years of engagement with examples of radical scholarship and public philosophy, language and border studies – we can see Tofighian’s own vision shine. His dedication to exposing coloniality, border harms and kyriarchal violence is intrinsic to every chapter, and his ability to weave narrative, translation, surrealism and storytelling by experience remains unique to his work. From documenting the structural violence of Australia’s carceral-border archipelago to the everyday conversations amongst people confined by borders, this book is as infuriating in some places as it is heartening in others. Creating New Languages of Resistance will be a touchstone for anyone wishing to develop publicly meaningful research and activism in the humanities and social sciences internationally. It is a call to creative resistance, a call to critical academia, and a methodological masterpiece.” - Victoria Canning, Professor of Criminology, Lancaster University, UK“This book offers a fascinating account of translation as philosophical activity. Centred on the author’s experience in bringing silenced – ‘born-in-translation’– voices into the public domain, it imaginatively reconstrues the common construct of the refugee as passive victim. The approach yields an informed, insightful critique of current global refugee policies centred on incarceration. While being accessible and emotionally engaging for a general readership, the book will also be a valuable resource for future scholarly research on forced migration. Creating New Languages of Resistance offers a vision of hope for what philosophy can become if it joins forces with the creative arts and literature in the public life of the mind.” - Genevieve Lloyd, Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of New South Wales; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities“Camps to detain people seeking asylum are a global nightmare. Many such camps operate outside the public view, silencing the inmates. Omid Tofighian shows how to collaborate with detainees to help amplify their voices – a first step towards agency and freedom. And a step towards acknowledging and ending the horrors of camps.” – Prof. Oliver Razum, Bielefeld University, Germany. Editor of Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia (Routledge)“This book is a unique and welcome contribution to knowledge on the politics of activism and resistance. Tofighian charts new terrain in scholarship by insisting in his scholarly and activist work on collaborative practices with displaced, exiled and incarcerated peoples. Much of the book concentrates on work produced on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea by, and in collaboration with refugees detained there by the Australian government. Tofighian calls this work ‘shared philosophical activity’ in building not only a politics of resistance, but also scoping alternative social futures. The book represents major works of collaboration, many translated by the author from Persian/Farsi. An analysis of translation as transformative work that represents in itself a form of public philosophy is a core aspect of many parts of the book, adding an important contribution to positioning the work of translation as an active voice and doing so alongside the important work highlighted throughout the book of epistemic debordering.” - Claudia Tazreiter, Professor of Sociology, Ethnic and Migration Studies, Linköping University, Sweden“This is one the fiercest anti-racist texts. Omid Tofighian not only continues to expose the kyriarchal realities of the border-industrial-complex, but also gives us an intellectual roadmap on how to resist and challenge the violence. A must read!” - Dr Monish Bhatia, Lecturer in Sociology, University of York, UK.“It is rare that a book emerges that generates a distinctive approach to a topic that has consistently piqued the interest of scholars, academics and the professions. Award-winning author Omid Tofighian has done just that on one of the most perplexing global political issues, particularly in the Australian context. Banishment of people seeking freedom and justice to offshore carceral sites has been the subject of human rights censure. What Tofighian achieves is to ground his analysis in theoretical, philosophical and practical insights as a politics of resistance. His call for collaborative endeavours of resistance speak to his work as a translator. Conventional idea about the field of translation see this methodology as a vehicle for ‘objectively’ conveying the views of others. Tofighian turns this notion around by arguing for translation as a human endeavour that does not shy away from subjectivity and relationships arising from solidarity. The breadth of the book and its accessible writing style, will appeal not only to a range of academic disciplines but also a general readership which despairs about the disintegration of our shared humanity and seeks new answers.” - Linda Briskman, Margaret Whitlam Chair of Social Work at Western Sydney University. Her most recent book, is the co-edited (with Rachel Sharples) Deter, Detain Dehumanise: The politics of seeking asylum (2024)“Creating New Languages of Resistance is essential reading for any scholar or activist who is interested in the border-industrial complex, creative practices of resistance, or translation studies. Understanding translation as a shared philosophical activity that has the potential to create new epistemic resources, Creating New Languages of Resistance argues that translation offers a model for collaborative knowledge production and a collective exercise in public philosophy. Tofighian builds from the insights afforded by his work with displaced, exiled and incarcerated knowers to foreground the creative and political potential of collective artistic and cultural resistance to the border-industrial complex while offering a sustained critique of the horrific surrealism of the Australian carceral border and the regimes it has inspired. Compellingly written, unflinching and inspiring, this book is the product of Tofighian’s reflective translation practice, scholarly expertise, and relentless commitment to co-creating a more just society.” - Dr Emma Cunliffe, Principal of Green College and Professor of Law, University of British Columbia“Translation has at once a colonial history and an emancipatory potential. Omid Tofighian’s translation practice is everywhere engaged in stretching toward the latter. Sustainedly connecting its scholarship and personal reflection to collaborative activism, this powerful book provides a window on to profound practices of freedom.” - Dr. Michael R. Griffiths, University of Wollongong“Today’s academic research in humanities and social sciences suffers from the tangible impacts of an ever-widening gap; the absence of a link between the researcher’s lived experience and/or socio-political engagement and what s/he is researching. In such a context, how can one expect a scholarly work to impact readers? Omid Tofighian’s new book specifically addresses this gap. In this truly intellectual and illuminating endeavour, Tofighian’s ‘voice’ is present as much as his profound and engaging scholarly knowledge. And this is simply brilliant.” - Dr Sajad Kabgani, translator and researcher at Deakin University, Australia“Tofighian's vision for a collaborative public philosophy is exciting, radical, and clear. By working alongside, rather than above or 'for' the non-academic thinkers and knowledge-makers, he collaborates to open up new worlds of intellectual and creative possibility. Most of all, Tofighian deeply understands that core absurdity of so-called Australia: that the government established to manage a penal colony, massacring and displacing the First Nations occupants to do so, is now in a panic to imprison and punish the 'wrong' types of arrivals somewhere else offshore. The overlapping rhetoric of 'White Australia' and 'tough-on-borders' is clear and the time for hierarchical - or kyriarchal - attitudes towards knowledge is over.” - Bri Lee, award-winning author, academic, and activist. Author of Eggshell Skull (2018), Beauty (2019), Who Gets to be Smart (2021) and The Work (2024)“Over two decades, Tofighian has translated a series of works by people who are displaced, exiled and incarcerated. Now he shares his reflections on what he calls this “shared philosophical activity” and on what is also a pragmatic form of politics. Often misunderstood as a technical process that takes place after the fact, Tofighian shows us translation on its own terms, as an intervention in epistemic justice and a form of co-creation. This thoughtful book by a provocative critic of Australia's border regime, invites us to consider the radical possibilities of digital methods and collaborations that only a short time ago could not have come to pass.” - Anne McNevin, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research“Omid Tofighian’s, Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence is a refreshing addition to multidisplinary study of transnational movements of people and ideas, and collaborative experimentations in producing stories of people involved in an ever more mobile world. Tofighian’s book is a wide-ranging and well-timed intervention, written in a very skilful and accessible prose. The book threads together diverse sources, theories, and questions to high light arrays of innovative experimentations involved in communicative actions, translation and storytelling.” - Ali Mirsepassi, Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor, New York University, USA“As both a scholar and activist, Omid Tofighian has proven himself to be one of the great innovators in the field of public philosophy. As this brilliant book shows, Tofighian uses what he terms 'shared philosophical activity' to open up new languages and possibilities for the displaced, exiled, and incarcerated peoples he works with. Tofighian's collaborative model serves to cultivate theoretical and imaginative forms of creative resistance that aim at nothing less than dismantling Australia's border-industrial complex. Tofighian's reimagining of public philosophy is extremely exciting and important. I hope this book gets the readership it deserves." - Anthony Morgan, Editor of The Philosopher “A politically galvanizing and intellectually engaging piece of scholarship that demonstrates the significance of translation – as a creative process, as a form of collaboration, as philosophical practice, as political resistance – in a world increasingly penned in by the violence of borders and incarceration. The significance in Tofighian's work – always conducted in conversation with multiple collaborators – is in its ability to draw our attention to the liberatory potential of translation as an urgently needed antidote to the myriad overlapping systems of repression and enclosure endemic to our contemporary condition.” - Golnar Nikpour, Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth College, and author of The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran“Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence is compelling, profound and radically original work. In this important book, translator, activist, collaborator and storyteller Omid Tofighian delves into the lived experience of people seeking asylum. He combines sophisticated analysis with deep understanding of border violence and its carceral impact on the body and mind of the refugee. The author activates our conscience and energies for change in this ground-breaking political and philosophical work.” – Baden Offord AO, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights, Curtin University“An incisive and deeply moving interrogation of Australia's brutal border-industrial complex. We have needed a new language to express the horrors of the carceral-border nation-state. Tofighian has given us one in this deeply humane book — that of the refugee.” - Kristina Olsson, writer and member of Sisters Inside“Omid Tofighian offers us this gift borne from his years of engaged scholarship and activism with migrants, as they have collectively challenged the multifaceted violence of border regimes—physical, material, discursive, and epistemological. Centering co-creation and relationship-building, his work of translation reveals how he and his collaborators have innovated “new languages of resistance” out of necessity, breaking through not only the physical separation of camps and borders, but also the social imaginary saturated with dehumanizing representations of migrants. Against this epistemological violence, their “shared philosophical activity” elevates his collaborators’ knowledge, history, experience, and relationships to create conditions where migrants can reclaim their narratives. In the process, their public philosophy shines harsh light on link binding those of us with citizen privilege to migrants and, thus, to our responsibility to dismantle the borders built to separate us. This book offers a desperately needed model to scholar-activists of non-extractive collaboration across differences of power and privilege.” - A. Naomi Paik, author of Rightlessness: Testimony & Redress in US Prison Camps Since World War II and Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding US Immigration for the 21st Century”“Omid Tofighian offers a master class in intelligent, concerted activism. His work as a translator embraces the full extent of cultural translation, combing language transfer with facilitation, media change, adaptation, elaboration, explanation, political promotion, and interventions in public philosophy. The cause is just: to bring to light the iniquities of holding refugees in indefinite detention. The analysis is elaborate: we follow the perverse machinations of physical, psychological, emotional and bureaucratic control over borders. And the message, especially for Australians but also for all Westerners with similar border complexes, should be one of deep and lasting shame.” - Anthony Pym, Professor of Translation Studies, The University of Melbourne“With characteristic nuance and rigour, Tofighian illuminates his superpower and personal artform: translation practices. More than the linear exchange of words, translation is revealed in its fullness, in interplays of philosophies and hermeneutics, in cycles of collaborative co-creation, in acts at once personal and highly technical, culminating in works of striking resistance. Here is an important contribution in a multilingual world in desperate need of more cultural bridges.” - Dr Hessom Razavi is an eye surgeon, essayist and poet. His most recent essay is “The best way out is always through” (Penguin Random House, 2024). He is the Director of Lions InReach Vision, an eye health service for refugees, asylum seekers and Indigenous people in Western Australia.“Equal parts memoir, anthology, treatise and manifesto, Omid Tofighian’s book explores translation as activism, artistic collaboration as solidarity, and philosophy as a means of platforming the oppressed. Erudite, internationalist to its core and righteously angry at a world defined by prisons and border policing, it’s an important theoretical and political intervention that deserves a wide audience.” - Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster, who works at the University of Melbourne.“Tofighian’s book brilliantly challenges and displaces the entrenched Cartesian model of the solitary, self-absorbed philosopher who, as Descartes put it in his Discourse on Method of 1637, “having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.” By contrast, the metaphilosophy running through Tofighian’s work is not individualistic or merely passive and academic, but a collaborative practice engaging exiled, incacerated, ‘illegal’ refugees riddled with cares and passions, pushing philosophy beyond the well-guarded borders of the profession towards unchartered territory promising new languages of creative resistance and alternate forms of knowledge production. This is the philosophy of the future.” – N. N. Trakakis (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University), joint winner of the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize for his translation of Tasos Leivaditis’ Autumn Manuscripts“This book takes forward Omid Tofighian’s existing work on new languages of creative resistance emerging from Australia’s carceral-border archipelago in the Pacific. It envisages a unique public philosophy emerging from this collective intellectual, artistic and political work, a shared philosophical activity that engages with the lived experience of those held in indefinite detention. Recent archival research establishes that this collaborative and creative resistance against border violence, demonstrated so eloquently in the production and reception of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, is embedded in the Pacific camps from the very beginning. Here, Tofighian insists, those subjected to punitive and indefinite detention occupy key roles as creative agents in a collaborative and collective generation of new languages of resistance.” - Emeritus Professor Gillian Whitlock, Author of Refugee Lives in the Archives. A Pacific Imaginary (Bloomsbury 2024)"Tofighian's book should be a wakeup call for translators all over the world. Facing neocolonial border management and techno-capitalism we are not only fighting to keep our own profession alive, but also to avoid the erasure of translation as a nuanced human activity. Translators have to prepare an argument, a narrative and an imaginary that demonstrates the precarious link between language, power and concrete human destinies. Omid Tofighian does this. And as demonstrated by this book: He is living this." - Erlend Wichne, translator, writer, Ph.D. in translation studies"Few embody what it means to engage with a ‘public philosophy committed to debordering in every way’ like the philosopher and translator Omid Tofighian, his collaborators, colleagues and friends. This book is a superb testimony to the power of the democratic ethos to challenge political and structural violence. This book is meticulous moral and theoretical achievement." - Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience"Creating New Languages of Resistance is a powerful analysis of the political potential of collaboration in the struggle to end border violence. Through the analytic of shared philosophical activity, Tofighian deftly shows that uncovering the logic of Australia’s border regime must begin from the premise that people seeking asylum are creative forces, theorisers, and knowledge producers in their own right. This book provides a blueprint for how scholars can engage with those affected by carceral borders without being extractive or reproducing the saviour-victim dynamic. As border regimes function to isolate, confine, and immobilize, Tofghian’s words remind us that creating knowledge through relations of care, exchange, and solidarity can be a radical form of resistance." - Helena Zeweri, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, and author of Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare."As a translator I’m so impressed with Omid Tofighian’s care and intellect applied to translating oppressed voices. Omid’s new book Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence explains what it means to create a new language of resistance and provides a multitude of examples of critical discussion points. Omid’s writing clearly demonstrates that translation work and collaboration can produce knowledge relevant to challenging border regimes." - Erna Walraven, Translator and Author of Hear me Roar (forthcoming May 2025)."Tofighian shows again the power of the pen, the keyboard and above all, words that cross borders in exposing and transforming Australia’s carceral-border archipelago - and beyond. Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence shows us the very real and formidable combination of collaboration, activism, translation and storytelling to work against, and put cracks in, white supremist, settler colonial and kyrichrical systems of oppression. Gratitude to Tofighian as a deep thinker and generous collaborator for our times." - Elise Klein, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University"Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence is essential for truly understanding his translation of Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains. The term 'refugee literature' has not yet been established as a genre. However, this book lays a new foundation for the genre by elucidating the background of refugee issues, the literary activism of refugees and their supporters, and the theories underpinning it. This book demonstrates how the new 'language of resistance' of refugees becomes possible through translation.” - Megumi Kato, PhD. Professor at Meisei University in Tokyo; publications include Narrating the Other: Australian Literary Perceptions of Japan“This book gets under your skin – and it bloody well should. In Creating New Languages of Resistance, Tofighian makes the reader feel the messy complexities, the fragmentation, the ‘horrific surrealism’ of the border-industrial carceral complex that constitutes Australia’s attempt to engage with and to hold off the ‘outside’ world. Tofighian and his many collaborators expand our conception of what philosophy is and what philosophy as a shared activity can (and can’t) do. CNLR provides the reader with narrative insight into the necessary role of translation in the messy arts of resistance, building networks of solidarity, creating new concepts, new languages, new narratives that enable both the analysis of the border-carceral kyriarchy and the articulation of fragmentary moments of pride and joy in conditions of unlivable life. Tofighian’s writing is border-crossing in multiple senses: in form and in genre, in disciplinarity, in creativity, and in expression. Tofighian does not seek to close down, to finalise, to determine. Focusing on process and relation, it opens up, indicates, gestures to further possibilities. The work is always collective, and the reader is asked, indeed called upon, to participate, to do work themselves. Creating New Languages of Resistance seeks to transform what is on either side of the border and – at least at the limit of hope – to widen the cracks in the border itself. This is necessary reading for all Australians and for all across the Western world complicit in the horrors it describes.” - Yarran Hominh, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Bard College.“Omid Tofighian is one of the most original and formidable thinkers about translation in the world. Renowned as the co-creator of transcendent literature from Manus Prison and other sites of violence, he now reveals the unique processes behind these acts of creation. A remarkable book.” - Richard Cooke, Author of Elon Musk: Dark Star Rising"A powerful act of intellectual disobedience... a disorienting, ethically intense, and methodologically challenging intervention that questions not only how we translate, but with whom, for whom, and at what expense.Creating New Languages of Resistance is not a book to be read passively. It demands engagement, discomfort, and transformation... a work that serves both as a critique and a call: to translate otherwise, to know differently, and to resist collectively."- Sara El Jemli (Euromed University of Fes)"Elucidates a genuinely powerful and wonderfully grounded perspective on translation and resistance, even as it extends an invitation to engage in the shared philosophical activity it reflexively represents.The book's true power lies [in how] it raises the crucial question — one we ought to consider both as academics and otherwise — what is our own vicinity to violence?"[Tofighian's] actual translational praxis — with its sensitivity to place, position, and the specificities of intellectual histories — is exemplary.-Ronya Ramrath, Journal of Applied Philosophy

• PrefaceIntroduction: Translation practice and public philosophy/ creative resistance and collective knowledgeA shared philosophical activity and the potential for public philosophyTranslation as political and philosophical rendering: new languages of resistance vs kyriocentric languageThe border-industrial complex: the refugee industry and pro-refugee/anti-refugee disposition The two islands thought experiment1. Translation as Resistance: Creating New Languages Through CollaborationStories of translation plans, processes and productsCrossing borders and arriving at translationRepresenting and translating carceral-border narrativesNotes on translationAppendix2. Translation as Public Philosophy: Creating New KnowledgesCreative resistance from inside the prison camps: the role of collaborators and translatorsDamaging narratives, damaging tropes/New narratives, new languagesNotes on translationAppendix3. Collaboration, Activism, Translation and Storytelling: Revisiting the 23-Day Siege on Manus PrisonCollective Knowledge and Resisting Border ViolenceTranslating interweaving narratives, combining diverse creationsPersonal communication and reception within the siege narrativeEpistolic networks and legacies: writing and translating letters about a tragedyThe final visit to Manus PrisonNotes on translationAppendix 1Appendix 24. Translation, Public Philosophy and Creative WorkTranslation and knowledge production: knowing border violenceTranslation and experimentationThe reception to No Friend but the MountainsNotes on translationAppendix5. Border-Industrial ComplexStorytelling, cultural memory and experimentationSynecdoche: Part/Whole Relationships of Border ViolenceIdentifying kyriarchy, exposing the kyriarchal systemNotes on translationAppendixConclusion: More translator's reflectionsIndex