Epistemic Translation of Modernity: Negotiating Science and Technology under Semi-Colonial Conditions

Abstract This article examines how Iranian intellectuals negotiated Western science and technology under semi-colonial sovereignty: a formally independent state constrained by unequal power. I argue that these negotiations operated through translation not only as linguistic transfer but as a recursive set of practices—adoption, reworking, and refusal—through which intellectuals repositioned science within Iranian political life as its authority shifted from universal reason to militarized power to developmental urgency. Using Frantz Fanon as a comparative framework, I identify four overlapping modes: (1) nineteenth-century epistemic translation, when science was framed as a route to reform; (2) early twentieth-century regulation of the “performative translator,” when translation became a site of linguistic, epistemic, and gendered policing; (3) mid-century emancipatory translation, shaped by the global militarization of science; and (4) iterative remembrance in the 1970s, when translation became a practice of insurgent authorship through cycles of forgetting and reactivation. The paper’s central paradox is that later thinkers strategically inhabited the position long maligned as the “performative translator”—the Europhile dandy or fokoli , later refigured and pathologized as the gharbzadeh (West-struck)—to claim new forms of insurgent authorship, even as such projects risked forging new orthodoxies. Tracing the genealogy of the fokoli , I show how debates over performative translation organized conflicts over method, authority, and epistemic nationalism. Ultimately, I argue that the reappropriation of the fokoli ’s maligned position reveals decolonization not as a clean rupture but as an ongoing metabolization of inherited materials. The article contributes to decolonial thought, translation studies, and the global intellectual history of science by reframing semi-colonial modernity as a struggle over epistemic authority conducted through the labor of translation.