Shela Sheikh is a Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (University of London), where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy programme and co-chairs the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies research stream. Prior to this she was Research Fellow and Publications Coordinator on the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project. She lectures and publishes internationally. Her research interrogates various forms of witnessing, between the human, technological, and environmental. Part of this entails an expanded conception of translation. A recent multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany, and the politics of planting includes ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’, a special issue of Third Text co-edited with Ros Gray (2018), and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018), co-edited with Uriel Orlow, as well as numerous workshops on the topic with artists, filmmakers, and environmentalists.
How to speak of oneself when one has no ‘proper’ language in which to do so? Through a reading of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin, this text explores the maddening paradoxes of identity, translation, the so-called mother tongue, and the coloniality of language and culture.