This book investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literatures in translation. Covering English-, French- and Spanish-language texts, the book applies Glissantian relational thinking to the study of translation and literary circulation, challenging core-periphery models in favour of alternative pathways of cultural exchange.

This ground-breaking study of the Caribbean's iconography traces the history of visual representations of the region,as perceived by outsider and insider alike, over the last five hundred years. It circles the Caribbean while focusing on Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, tracing the parameters drawn on each society by the colonial encounter and drawing from the methodologies and material of history, literature, art, gender, and cultural studies.

This volume brings together scholars working in different languages—Creole, French, English, Spanish—and modes of cultural production—literature, art, film, music—to suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.

Translation is a highly contested site in the Americas where different groups, often with competing literary or political interests, vie for space and approval. In its survey of these multiple and competing groups and its study of the geographic, socio-political and cultural aspects of translation, Edwin Gentzler’s book demonstrates that the Americas are a fruitful terrain for the field of translation studies. Building on research from a variety of disciplines including cultural studies, linguistics, feminism and ethnic studies and including case studies from Brazil, Canada and the Caribbean, this book shows that translation is one of the primary means by which a culture is constructed: translation in the Americas is less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more something that is capable of establishing those very cultures. Using a variety of texts and addressing minority and oppressed groups within cultures, Translation and Identity in the Americas highlights by example the cultural role translation policies play in a discriminatory process: the consequences of which can be social marginalization, loss of identity and psychological trauma. Translation and Identity the Americas will be critical reading for students and scholars of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

This remarkable new dictionary represents the first attempt in some four centuries to record the state of development of English as used across the entire Caribbean region.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Carbet--an award won by such distinguished authors as Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, and Raphaël Confiant-- Memory at Bay is now available in an English translation that brings to life this powerful novel by one of Haiti’s most vital authors, Évelyne Trouillot. Trouillot introduces us to a bedridden widow of a notorious dictator (in effect, a portrait of Papa Doc Duvalier) and the young émigré who attends to her needs but who harbors a secret--the bitter loss she feels for her mother, a victim of the dictator’s atrocities. The story that unfolds is a deftly plotted psychological drama in which the two women in turn relive their radically contrasting accounts of the dictator’s regime. Partly a retelling of Haiti’s nightmarish history under Duvalier, and partly an exploration of the power of memory, Trouillot’s novel takes a suspenseful turn when the aide contemplates murdering the old widow. Memory at Bay was praised by the Prix Carbet committee for the way it treats the enigmas of destiny and for a pairing of characters whose voices bring the narrative to the edge of the ineffable. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.