Translational Space and Creolising Aesthetics in Three Women’s Novels: the Diasporic Turn
Joan Anim-Addo
This paper proposes the notion of translational space to consider the classroom and the literary text as crucial though differentiated spaces of translation. The idea of ‘translational space’ borrows from Doreen Massey’s elaboration of space as a ‘complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation’ (Massey 31). Interlinking the complexity of Massey’s ‘web’ with an intention to translate, I am concerned to interrogate how selected Caribbean diasporic texts might be shown to engage a process of translation, and for whom especially, since Lamming’s pronouncement concerning the West Indian writer, that ‘[h]e writes always for the foreign reader’ (1960). What is the translational impetus of a later generation of writers who Lamming was unable to imagine, namely, women authors of the region?
Central to my enquiry is the diasporic imaginary represented in Beryl Gilroy’s In Praise of Love and Children (1996), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), and Velma Pollard’s Karl (2008). I refer to an imaginary which places black women characters at or near the centre of the novel; is concerned with a dialogic representation of the other, heightens issues of Creole or Caribbean identity, and figures, through its aesthetics, the diaspora as contested space whether public or intimate. Arising from this, my large question concerns the Creole diasporic imaginary and meanings that might be inferred in terms of aesthetics and translational space. I propose to explore the fictional representation of Caribbean lives ‘on the move’ in Cresswell’s terms (2006) and their meanings in relation to an increasingly transnational representation. In their gendering of creolisation, diaspora and race, how do the writers translate the spatial interface that their characters negotiate? Whether in memories of Toronto in Pollard’s writing or the London of Levy’s and Gilroy’s fiction, how do these texts represent space not only as culture crossings but also as translational space within the ‘new triangle’ that contests and dislodges notions of identity? What part does the dislocated Creole cosmopolitan play in such translation, and how might the classroom as translational space assist the process of translation?
Once Everyone is ‘Other’: Benjamin Zephaniah’s Feats of Intercultural Translation
R. Victoria Arana
“… intercultural translation as a practice that excavates affiliations and reconfigures the concepts to address them is a postnational, creolizing and hybrid practice that defies epistemological, cultural and linguistic borders and affirms the contact zones of cultures, languages and narratives without glossing over the gaps, differences, and oppositions.” — Mina Karavanta
In line with Mina Karavanta’s challenging definition of intercultural translation, this paper explores—by way of illustration—how one contemporary writer vociferously defies borders per se to affirm the ineluctable reality of social affiliation, notwithstanding the differing cultural provenances and cognitive schemata of intermixed present-day populations. Black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah confronts and contests hegemonic epistemological projects and celebrates a conceptual space where everyone is both self and other at the same time. While such a space (or world) is arguably nonexistent in stark political terms at present, as a conceptual and personal starting place such a space must surely be, according to Zephaniah, the crucible of tolerable cultural change and, perhaps, of cultural (social, political, and educational) innovation.
Translating/ed Beings in a Shared World
Giovanna Covi
This paper addresses translation literally, culturally and ontologically. Its aim is to define the relation between creolization, multiculturalism, interculturality for a representation of transnational interconnectedness that casts national identities within a shared globalization.
It engages the following concepts: poetry (A. Lorde), giving an account of oneself (J. Butler), the lesbian continuum (A. Rich), feelings and affects (E. K. Sedgwick, L. Gandhi), shame (E. Sedgwick), objects/subjects (D. Haraway), interpellation (Althusser, Lacan, Foucault as revised by Butler, hooks and Doane), comparativism (G. C. Spivak, D. Kadhir), conversation (A. Appiah). It wrenches relations among these concepts by analyzing the following texts: Imoinda by Joan Anim Addo, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Skin Between Us by Kym Ragusa, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, She Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid. Some of these texts are used as pedagogical strategies, while others, mostly Anim-Addo and Kincaid provide the grounds for the articulation of the supporting argument.
It argues for the representation of subjectivities that entail the possibility of subversion and disobedience while resting on their own vulnerability. It seeks cultures that prevent us from falling into a regime of terror, in which crisis becomes a state of emergency. It struggles to keep the addressee in an equal albeit different relationship with the addresser. By pursuing the impossibility of language in general, even before translation (W. Benjamin), the paper suggests that joining poetics with politics and ethics may show the way towards building linguistic, social, psychological collectivities of belonging. It reiterates that this path cannot be taken without first accepting that masculinity is not for men only as much as femininity is not for women only, without posing as opaque the encounter between the subject and its body as well as the objects of relations and affects, as opaque as the transsexual and transgender bodies are. This opacity allows us to envision the mutual empowering of the singularity if the YOU and the singularity of the I. It makes clear as well that identities—individual, national, transnational—never take shape outside of a scene, since they are always interpellated. On the scene the subject becomes itself as it speaks itself, translates itself, and thus always already also desubjectivize itself. This is the multicultural process within which interculturality and creolization may occur. When this does, the paper suggests that a most fruitful sharing of cultures also takes place and nurtures the liberation of beings in a more democratic world.
Who is Imoinda? – Exploring ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ at the Pitt Rivers Museum
Viv Golding and Maria H. Lima
In this paper we reflect, together with a group of international students, on the affective and political power of texts and contexts. Our starting point is Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda (2001), a text whose form, setting, and narrative structure render productive moments of Relation in which individuals and their historical experiences establish connection to each other through difference rather than commonality. Not only does Imoindaintellectually re-visit and rewrite Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), the first literary work to grasp the global interactions of the modern world, but it tells the story of the slave trade from the point of view of the enslaved African princess left silent in the earlier text. Anim-Addo’s libretto allows for sensory re-connections with musical forms and art from around the globe, enabling different audiences to understand subjective experiences of dislocation and the ongoing negotiations of the Atlantic slave trade legacy. In this light, the transcultural heritage of Caribbean culture forged from a history which so distinctively shaped Enlightenment thought can be retrieved from the margins.
At the time of writing this abstract a series of collaborative teaching workshops are being designed with Andy McLellan, the Head of Education and his colleagues at the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford. The context for these workshops—a Western Humanities core course in the State University of New York University system taught at New College, Oxford, as a study abroad program—is itself a site of relation and interaction where “’other’ cultures within” translate cultures, since not only are students not hegemonically white and “American,” but the Triangle Trade lies at the core of the version of history being shared. To date we are thinking of ways to engage our students in the transnational space inherent in Imoinda as noted above, as well as in the tangible and intangible heritage the Pitt Rivers Museum houses. The ‘interculturality’ of Imoinda in terms of text, music and context, reading, writing and witnessing creates another contact zone of sorts (to use Mary Louise Pratt’s term) which demands a re-examination of our paradigms for the analysis of subject formation and representation outside conventional binaries and across the Black Atlantic.
Precisely because globalization continues to admit and subjugate different cultures into the realm of capital, the roots of the current system, its historical connections with earlier kinds of imperialism, demand both analysis and critique, which Imoinda triggers. Theoretically we will also be drawing on Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler and Audre Lorde’s writing to illuminate notions of bridging Distance and Proximity with respectful dialogue and action to progress intercultural understanding and human rights. Such cultural translations allow for a renewed understanding of ways in which cultural identity and power relations continue to operate within global (and local) frameworks. For Joan Anim-Addo, as for Edouard Glissant, recognizing the complicated existence of the past within the present is just as essential to changing society as the ability to understand our contemporaries.
Intercultural Translation: Interculturality, Creolization and “Signifying Minority” Narrative in the Age of Transnationalism
Mina Karavanta
I focus on intercultural translation not only as a practice of cultural mediation and transference from one linguistic tradition to another but also as a strategy of “affiliating” (Edward Said, 1994) oppositional cultures of uneven hegemonic power, as the exercise of the political in a world that has become more interculturally connected. By intercultural, I do not refer to a bowdlerized version of multiculturalism purged of the nationalist and racist origins of the assimilationist politics and policies that various western nation-states implement to accommodate the continuous growth of new diasporic and ethnic communities. Instead, interculturality invokes the literary, social, historical and political processes by which new affiliations between the dominant or host culture and the non-dominant or migrant and diasporic cultures are forged in the age of transnationalism that has facilitated processes of transculturation–rather than acculturation–that unsettle former cultural hegemonies, despite the persistence and exponential growth of economically, socially and politically uneven and unequal relations between different nations and communities (Anim-Addo, Covi & Karavanta).
To examine the potentiality of intercultural poetics and politics by way of engaging the current challenges that metropolitan cultures present as constellations of cultures, languages, ethnicities and religions that unsettle the power dynamic of dominant versus minor culture, I focus on Joan Anim-Addo’s Imoinda or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008). An intercultural libretto, Imoinda counterwrites the history of colonial modernity by revising the genres of tragedy and opera examined as the par excellence genres of a modernity often represented as a western project, the project of the White Christian Man (Sylvia Wynter). Imoinda does not only contribute to the “palimpsestic narrative” (Gayatri Spivak) of imperialism; it also translates the story of Imoinda, the expropriated African princess who mothers the Caribbean diaspora, into the history of a “signifying minority” (Anim-Addo) narrative that reconfigures the epistemological concepts on which this history centers: expropriation engenders exappropriation, loss engenders survival, deracination engenders community making.
Through this process of translation, the history of the constituency represented as a minority signifies the connected, albeit discrepant, affiliated, albeit uneven, histories of expropriated peoples and their communities that found the project of modernity. Their histories signify the singular story of the constituency made an exception by the processes of exceptionalism, the history of the past, namely, the history of the community from which this constituency was wrenched and of which she was deprived, and the history of the present, the making of a diasporic, intercultural community. People “do not live on exception” but on “relation” (Édouard Glissant); intercultural translation as a practice that excavates affiliations and reconfigures the concepts to address them is a postnational, creolizing and hybrid practice that defies epistemological, cultural and linguistic borders and affirms the contact zones of cultures, languages and narratives without glossing over the gaps, differences, and oppositions. It is an agonistic practice that tries to promote intercultural dialogue and “democratic criticism” (Said 2004). It can contribute to the questioning and quest of a democracy that “begins with two” and that, following Luce Irigaray’s poetic analysis, “renounces the desire to possess the other in order to recognize him as other” in order to move in the “history of the relations between the genders but also of that between races, generations, traditions” (6), cultures and communities.
Translating old postcards of Grenada
Antonia MacDonald
Picture postcards were initially used by colonial authorities to entice potential investors to a tropicalized Caribbean. In their depiction of idealized landscapes from which Afro-Caribbean subjects were conspicuously absent, these postcards promoted a bucolic Caribbean that re-inscribed the Eldorado myth which centuries ago had drawn hordes of Europeans to the Caribbean. Extending my interest in the ways in which contrapuntal readings help uncover stories of Afro-Creole agency and subjectivity embedded within imperial narratives of the Caribbean, I will in this paper focus on how a collection of old picture postcards of Grenada donated to the Grenada National Museum by Mario Berruti, an Italian postcard collector, allows for a reimagining of an imperial history of Grenada, one marked by both colonial domination and rebellion. In this paper, I propose to answer the following questions: What kind of cultural historiography of Grenada can these picture postcards be made to yield? How do I open up this visual domain so as to reveal its biases, its ever-shifting sites of agency? How can these old picture postcards of Grenada be translated into productive transcultural dialogue?
Part of the critical scaffolding that I am creating to facilitate my reading is constructed from ideas articulated in our first IRNM brainstorming session in Leicester. “How can the whole be shown to include everyone, the . . . hegemonic and the . . . marginal as parts of the ongoing dynamic of predictable creolization . . .” In extending this narrative of inclusiveness, I explore how as teacher, researcher and community member I can help translate this collection into an opportunity to bring different stakeholders and constituencies together: the Ministry of Education, the Board of Tourism, St. George’s University and Mario Berruti can all partner with the museum in extending the modern day use of these postcards. Out of the ensuing cross-fertilization of ideas, the resource sharing and commitment to similar goals can come economic growth and cultural development of Grenada.
Translation, Hibridity, and Relation: Helen Zughaib’s “Changing Perceptions” and Suheir Hammad’s breaking poems
Lisa Marchi
In her introduction to Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (2000), Sherry Simon writes: “In a phrase which has been widely echoed, Salman Rushdie claimed that migrants are ‘translated beings.’ … But migrants are also active agents of cultural exchange; they “translate” as they are ‘translated’” (28). Translation, as Simon suggests here, is an ambivalent and complex practice, one that raises questions of privilege and authority, while at the same time contributing to the uncovering and subverting of structures of inequality.
Starting with my experience as a teacher of Italian to immigrant students and adult learners and following with examples drawn from our shared teaching practice in Washington D.C. and my ongoing research on Arab-American poetry, the proposed paper explores different types of translation, by analyzing two creolized “texts” produced in the metropolitan borderland of US society: the cycle of paintings “Changing Perceptions” (2005) by Arab-American artist Helen Zughaib and the collection breaking poems (2008) by Arab-American poet Suheir Hammad.
The paper analyses the ways in which members belonging to “other” cultures within the US translate their own as well as other cultures through their art. The article proposes to consider not only diasporic “texts” but also today’s classrooms, societies, and nations as new zones of cultural contacts, sites of relation and interaction where “other” cultures translate cultures, linking and mixing linguistic and cultural strands to undo fixed binary oppositions and negotiate a more hospitable in-between space. It argues that translation and relation are crucial tools for both diasporic artists and their publics to promote intercultural exchange and understanding, rewrite and reorder linguistic and cultural differences, and reconfigure self, cultures, and nations in more inclusive terms.
The paper engages with ideas of translation, interculturality and creolization in an attempt to identify the tensions traversing these new contact zones; it entertains a growing conversation with Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, with which the chosen “texts” share a set of common themes, artistic strategies, and goals.
Seeing laundry through different eyes
Peter Roberts
The formula thѐse, antithѐse, synthѐse is said to have been erroneously associated with Hegel, but, whether or not it is, it has formed a fundamental part of western thought process and practice. For instance, a debate (in school, parliament, the law courts) has a proposition, opposition and a resolution. In the American political system there is a belief that good governance requires checks and balances, but note that in today’s political world ‘spin doctors’ (a prerequisite for political parties) are seen as manipulative.
Colonial writing up to the nineteenth century provided a mostly European perspective of the colonies. In the twentieth century the Empire started to ‘write back’, reinterpreting and presenting a different perspective as a counterbalance. Today visual communication has come to dominate politics, entertainment and education and the old adages ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ are increasingly seen to be naive, because of the ways in which images can be doctored and misused. Historical images of the Caribbean are therefore being reinterpreted.
A research project that I have been working on is An Encyclopedia of Caribbean Island Culture: Illustrated Social History. It is at the heart and soul of translating cultures in that selection and description of historical images require interpretation and explanation, especially since the ‘creators’ of these images were foreign to the culture they were describing and often not eyewitnesses. What I do in this paper is to select an entry from the encyclopedia [Laundry] to illustrate some of the challenges faced in translating cultures. Laundering clothes involves various elements of technology and reflects the level of sophistication of a society. It has been woman’s work in many societies and this includes the Caribbean. From the earliest years in the Caribbean colonies, visitors found the methods of laundering so interesting that many of them wrote about and illustrated them. In many cases the comments and images were disparaging, suggesting that there was something terribly wrong with the way laundry was being done and the women doing it. Yet, it was very apparent that some of the methods used were not so different from those used in Europe. The pictorial representations provide dimensions that go beyond the verbal comments. However, the question, in the final analysis, is whether, when I give an opposing view of laundry in the Caribbean (as one example of many), synthѐse is possible, or whether I am just being a ‘spin doctor’.
Circuits of Identity and the production of gendered, spatial affects in the work of three women poets
Suzanne Scafe
This paper engages with the ‘turn to space’ in order to explore constructions of space in the poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Dorothea Smartt and Velma Pollard, and to examine the extent to which these spaces can be used to reveal and interrogate the circuits of departure, arrival and return within which creolized diasporic identities are produced. Beginning with the work of Middleton and Woods, Nigel Thrift and Doreen Massey, I look at ways in which their work contests a ‘deeply essentialist and internalist way of thinking about a place and its character’ (Massey 1995, 183), privileging instead a ‘“wayfaring”’ perspective that emphasises the fluidity of place/space. In the work of these poets, the use of a specific, named space – Portobello, Brockwell Park, Brixton market, Montserrat – draws attention to its material interconnections, emphasising that the ‘local’ or specific is ‘always already a product in part of ‘global’ forces, where global in this context refers … to the geographical beyond, the world beyond the place itself’ (183). Naming itself speaks of translations that are produced by the constant encounter of commerce and culture and the consequent repositioning of borders.
Within these more conventional articulations of space, I turn to the use of gendered objects as objects or commodities, and the circulation of objects between individuals across time and space, creating ‘affective spaces of commitment’ (Thrift 2006,143). The transportation of commodities such as hair products, ‘de cod liver oil pill dem’, the shipping barrel and its contents or religious iconography, each with its own complicated geography, creates a space of emotion which expresses the longing and the loss produced by separation and absence or the hope of return: these objects also reflect a life of labour and of women’s commitment to and care for others. Taking as central to my discussion the proposition that ‘everything, but everything, is spatially distributed, down to the smallest monad’ (140), I focus on the ways in which objects used to regulate women’s sexuality, as represented in Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s ‘Slam Poem’ for example, are spatially configured, reflecting the routes of knowledge production and cultural reproduction that continue to control women’s sexual identities. In contrast I argue that their creolized poetics constructs its own space of radical hybridity and resistance to bordered locations and bounded, regulated identities.