In Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid, Carli Coetzee explores the ‘enduring ending’ (p. ix) of apartheid in South Africa, conceptualized as an ongoing process. She theorizes two possible responses to this enduring ending, which she terms ‘accenting’ and ‘translation’. Accenting, in her understanding, means cultivating ways of thinking and engagement that ‘are aware of the legacies of the past, and do not attempt to empty out the conflicts and violence under the surface’ (p. x). Accenting is an activist task that embraces conflict and disagreement as a necessary part of the work that must be done to eventually bring about the long ending of apartheid – work that includes academic writing and teaching, but also extends beyond the academic domain.

Accenting is presented as an alternative to ‘translation’. Translation is frequently viewed as enabling communication across linguistic and cultural divides, promoting equality and reconciliation. Coetzee's aim is to expose the fallacy of translation as benevolent, equalizing, and conciliatory, instead drawing attention ‘to translation's silencing effects and to the enduring effects of early translation practices in South Africa’ (p. xiv). A substantial body of theoretical and empirical work in translation studies has demonstrated how translation is profoundly imbricated in structures of power; relationships of power direct the movement of translation, privileging the linguistic and cultural representations of dominant languages and cultures, and effacing the linguistic and cultural difference of less powerful languages and cultures.

Lawrence Venuti has theorised this argument extensively, contending that in translation from minor to major languages, the expectation of fluency (in other words, conformance to the expectations of the receiving culture and language) serves to remove traces of difference in the text, violently domesticating it to the purposes of the dominant, receiving culture. In contrast, Venuti promotes resistant translation strategies – strategies that disrupt the expectation of fluency. Coetzee's view of translation echoes that of Venuti's domesticating, fluent translation, and her argument in favour of accenting shows much overlap with the ethical project of foreignisation:

The book comprises ten chapters. The first chapter sets out Coetzee's position against translation, and in favor of accent, from a theoretical perspective. The subsequent chapters range across a number of case studies that examine a variety of texts, artworks, and artefacts as well as the discursive practices that shape (and are shaped by) the texts. These discursive practices are most frequently placed in contexts of learning and teaching, in particular the university, since part of Coetzee's argument aims to demonstrate how accenting is an essential component of the South African teaching and learning environment.

The texts analyzed include a wide range of contemporary written texts (and their readings) including Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni, and Kopano Ratele's There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (2009); the essays of Njabulo Ndebele collected in Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991) and Fine Lines From the Box (2007); Three Letter Plague (Johnny Steinberg, 2009); Native Nostalgia by Jacob Dlamini (2009); and, the scholarly and creative work of Zoë Wicomb and J. M. Coetzee. It also moves beyond the written text in its concern with visual texts and the discourses surrounding them, including both art and art history and (dubbed and subtitled) film. Coetzee's interests are not only contemporary. In Chapter Five she presents an analysis of early translation practices at the Cape, finding that ‘[i]nstead of the mutuality and equality promised by translation encounters, we find instead examples of unequal language contact, and asymmetries which have remained as dominant features of the South African multilingual landscape’ (p. 79). There is a personal, reflective strand woven throughout the book devoted to her own experiences with accented teaching practices.

Coetzee presents an important argument about the importance of actively engaging with conflict and difference, relevant to current concerns in South Africa. The range of analyses and diversity of topics presented is one of the strengths of the book. The fine-grained analyses produce reflective readings of considerable depth – even if one might find some cause for disagreement with them. For the most part, the central focus on the concepts of accenting and translation provides a sufficient degree of conceptual coherence to tie the diverse analyses together, allowing the reader to see the diverse forms that accenting may take: the refusal to be translated; the recovery of hidden language histories; the cultural reframing of narratives of disease; and, the insistence on living at difficult multilingual intersections rather than submitting to the easy homogeneity of translation. The concern with teaching and learning is another consolidating theme, where accented practices are seen as part of the work of both teacher and student, both writer and reader. A recurrent attention to situatedness, involving a focus on the notion of ‘address’ (simultaneously both the place where one speaks from and the audience one speaks to), is another thread that runs through the book. Despite this, some sections of the book appear somewhat fragmentary and disjointed: the latter part of the book is a collection of loosely-connected essays rather than a sustained argument.

As a translation scholar, I have some theoretical reservations as well. Coetzee's thinking echoes that of prominent scholars in translation studies, yet her engagement with theorisation from within that field is scant, and does not reflect the breadth or depth of the ways the discipline has taken up questions similar to those that concern her. Furthermore, Coetzee makes little reference to the work of South African translation scholars, many of whom have theorised the question of identity and translation in African contexts. At some points in the text, this leads to a characterization of ‘translation’ in South Africa that appears at odds with reality. For example, the statement that ‘translation nowadays, in official contexts in South Africa, predominantly happens into English, out of other South African languages’ (p. 5) is highly contestable. Many analyses of South African publishing have demonstrated precisely the inverse: English and Afrikaans dominate the publishing landscape as languages of original text production, while publishing in the African languages relies heavily on translation from English. Her emphasis on ‘official contexts’ neglects the multiple, complex ways in which translation functions in the informal contexts of development in South Africa. This does not necessarily invalidate Coetzee's argument, but certainly raises some questions about the notion of ‘translation’ that is the foil for the central concept of accenting.

Despite these points of criticism, Accented Futures is a challenging and provocative set of readings of South African culture that foregrounds the importance of difference and conflict as part of activist writing, reading, learning, and teaching practices in the ongoing work of bringing about the ending of apartheid. As such it is a necessary, unsettling, difficult antidote to comfortably anodyne versions of post-apartheid South Africa.