Posts featuring Gayatri Spivak

Translating the Caribbean

November 1, 2023 | in Interviews | by Aaron Coleman, C. Francis Fisher, Kaiama Glover, and Urayoán Noel

The translations lead to thinking about what translation makes possible in a critical sense and in a differently shaped and understood archive.

The following conversation took place after a reading as part of “Colloquy: Translators in Conversation,” a series based in New York City and sponsored by World Poetry Books. In April 2023, the Clemente in Manhattan hosted the fifth installment of Colloquy, “Translating the Caribbean” with Aaron Coleman, Urayoán Noel, and Kaiama Glover. After the reading, the curator of the series, C. Francis Fisher, engaged the translators in the following conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.

C. Francis Fisher (CF): I want to start by asking about the title of this event. I named this evening “Translating the Caribbean” and I’m wondering whether that idea of translating the Caribbean is helpful in terms of the work that you do or whether it glosses over important differences between the cultures, languages, and realities of different islands in the Caribbean.

Aaron Coleman (AC): I’m glad that you opened with this question because for me “the Caribbean” is just one of the many frames that we can have in mind when translating. I’ll say for me, there are various frames that I try to hold in my mind at the same time. One would obviously be the national, but even within the national, we see the way that blackness sometimes complicates national identities. So, there’s the national and then there’s frames within the national, but then there’s also a regional frame to the Caribbean.

For me, the frame that I’m always searching for and curious about is beyond the national at a diasporic scale. So, we could call this translating the Caribbean, but I was also thinking about translating the African diaspora.

Kaiama Glover (KG): I’m glad you spoke first. I had a hot take. I still have the same take, but now I’ve sat with it for a second [laugh]. I have no problem with that grouping that in some ways elides the borders between the various nation states of the Caribbean because the Balkinization of the islands was based on legacies of colonialism that are still intact and have left us with language that makes it difficult for people who are of the same broad history and related culture to communicate. First, there was the initial break of community, the kidnapping of the middle passage, and then there is the persistence of that breaking through the nation language borders of the Caribbean. So, I love translating the Caribbean outward toward the diaspora. READ MORE…

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A Silent Textual Revolution: On Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart

February 7, 2022 | in Reviews | by Fairuza Hanun

Its words capacitate the human imagination’s ability to dream of change . . .

In My Heart by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng, translated from the Sesotho by Nhlanhla Maake, Seagull Books, 2021

Despite an intent to explore beyond Anglocentric spaces, the framework of decolonial studies—defined as the analysis of dynamics between Anglocentrism and colonialism as well as of colonised populations—is still plagued with first-world privileges. Most decolonial texts are theorised and written by a dominantly white scholar community, within a hegemonic Euro-U.S. production. In fact, in the introduction to the original text of Pelong ya Ka (translated as “In My Heart”), Simon Gikandi quoted Karin Barber on how postcolonial criticism has failed to include texts written in African languages, “eliminating African-language expression from view.” By designating Anglocentrism as the form of knowledge production, academia defines what can be classified as “decolonial writing” based on an imperialist discipline of worth determination—comprising of research, praxis, theories, formulations, and discourses operating in materialistic space. To have decolonial texts navigate inter- and intrapersonal spaces is almost unheard of, and is unacknowledged as “real” decolonial scholarship in the Anglo academic sphere.

Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s In My Heart is a collection of meditative essays which enter and navigate these unheard-of spaces, introducing Sesotho worldview in radical decolonial studies. In this undertaking, he charts the territory of the heart, wherein the values and experiences largely considered universal—such as death and time—are interrogated instead as largely dominated by privilege. Gayatri Spivak introduces this book, the second publication of Seagull Books’ “Elsewhere Texts” series, as among the pivotal works of decolonial studies within their respective countries, essential in fighting “against a rest-of-the-world counter-essentialism.” She criticises the “global” efforts in bridging multiple cultures, however, through “the imperial languages, protected by a combination of sanctioned ignorance and superficial solidarities . . . even when they are at these global functions.”