Translating multiple wavelenghts: Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The complex relations between East and West have always been a major concern for Mira Nair, the diasporic filmmaker whose works are in many ways representative of what Naficy (2001) has termed “accented cinema”. His notion of ‘accent’ foregrounds the displacement of the filmmakers and their modes of production, rather than the accented speech of the diegetic characters. Such a concept is meant to highlight how the various reasons why accented filmmakers live and work in countries other than their own turn into different aesthetic responses to their experience of displacement, be it through exile, migration or diaspora. This chapter focuses on Mira Nair's "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (2012), an ambitious project that goes beyond the experience of the Asian subcontinent diaspora in the sense that, while showing a deep concern for the crucial issues of emigration, displacement and identity, the film contextualises them in the narrative of the relationship between East and West and of how they regard each other. Watching this film involves multiple acts of translation across cultures and languages which, against the backdrop of a network of cultural and linguistic signification, instantiate points of convergence and divergence, (mis)understanding and (mis)trust. Like most accented films, TRF relies on code switching, Urdu and American English, to mark not only cultural identity, but also the characters’ ways of positioning (Bleichenbacher 2008). Hence, the scenes shot entirely in Urdu and the presence of words in Urdu ‘intruding’ into the English text do have a role to play, in that the Anglophone audience are made explicitly aware of the Eastern dimension also through language choice. Drawing on the system of appraisal (Martin and White 2005), the analysis focuses on the original version of TRF along with the Italian dubbed and subtitled versions to explore value positions, their translation and how they are negotiated on both ideological and axiological levels in the film also in relation to the «shared knowledge» - social, cultural and political – of local and “transnational” communities.