The Entrepreneurial Translator: Accelerated Fluency and Neoliberal Self-Optimization in Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s the Centre

Abstract

This article analyzes Siddiqi’s The Centre (2023) as a sharp literary anatomy of neoliberal self-optimization. Existing discussions of the novel have understandably emphasized language politics, cultural appropriation, and the ethics of translation; however, the novel also offers a sustained critique of achievement culture, accelerated learning, and the entrepreneurial imperative to convert every aptitude into capital. Bringing together Michel Foucault’s account of human capital, Nikolas Rose’s work on advanced liberal subject formation, Ulrich Bröckling’s theorization of the entrepreneurial self, and Byung-Chul Han’s analyses of burnout and psychopolitics, we argue that Siddiqi’s speculative institution does not merely teach languages: it manufactures competitive subjects by compressing time, disciplining affect, and transforming intimacy into extractive infrastructure. Through close reading of Anisa Ellahi’s desire to become a “real” translator, the article shows how the novel links literary aspiration to market legibility, bodily absorption, and the violent incorporation of others’ lives. The Centre ultimately reveals that under neoliberal reason, self-making appears voluntary and empowering even when it is organized through exhaustion, hierarchy, and cannibal extraction.