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 the British trial documents in conversation with an Arabic novel about 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. In the archive, British officials use untranslatability to justify delay, absence, and fatal error. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī’s novel The Maiden of Dinshaway dramatizes this, turning on instances of miscommunication in the colonial courtroom. The novel’s own mis/translation of Victor Hugo ultimately rejects legal justice in favor of a violent, divine, disproportionate compassion (raḥma). The talk ends by asking how raḥma might inform reparative modes of comparison and translation in the context of ongoing colonial and settler-colonial violence today.
Hannah Scott Deuchar teaches 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, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press in June 2026. 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 2025-26 is a Humboldt Research Fellow joint-hosted by EUME and Freie Universität Berlin.
Valeska Huber is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her research combines international and global history of the 19th and 20th centuries with social and microhistorical approaches. She specialises in the history of mobility and migration with a focus on the Middle East, epidemics and international health policy, as well as communication and (global) publics, particularly in relation to education, literacy, and language. In her current book project, she is examining the question of universal access to information through the example of 20th-century literacy campaigns.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
