This article explores the ways in which African American Mercer Cook's translation practice reflects complex overlaps between his professional/personal selves and an ideological backdrop that ...encompasses black internationalism, US race struggles and mid-twentieth-century diplomatic relations with Africa. A first section explores how Cook, a university professor of French, uses what he terms the “close-to-home” value of translation in order to expose his African American students to what has been written about them in French. At the same time, translation is seen by him as essential to building a “shared elsewhere” where his students can reflect on their place within a black world that is neither nation-bound nor monolingual. A second section examines the way in which Cook's translation practice is inflected by his role as US ambassador in francophone West Africa during the 1960s. In this context, the convergence of US civil rights with official US Cold War policy on postcolonial African states is key to understanding Cook's stance as a translator and the way in which he seeks diplomatically to propel his translations of L.S Senghor's texts towards a racially riven US readership.
My Black Stars Thuram, Lilian; Dubois, Laurent
05/2021
eBook
People, young and old, need stars to guide them. They need models
to construct their own identity, to build their self-esteem, to
change the way they see the world and to overcome their own and
...others' prejudice. During my childhood, many stars were pointed out
to me. I admired them, dreamt about them: Socrates, Baudelaire,
Einstein, Marie Curie, General de Gaulle, Mother Teresa… But nobody
ever spoke to me about black stars. The world of my education was
white, from the colour of the school walls to the pages of my
textbooks. I knew nothing about my own ancestors. Slavery was the
only black subject ever mentioned. In this vision, the history of
Black people could only ever be a vale of tears and strife. Can you
tell me the name of a black scientist? A black explorer? A black
philosopher? A black pharaoh? If you don't know the answer to these
questions, then, whatever the colour of your skin, this book is for
you. Because the best way to fight racism and intolerance is to
educate ourselves and to broaden our imaginations. The portraits of
the men and women in this book are a product of my own reading and
my interviews with scholars. Starting with Lucy and ending with
Barack Obama, and along the way meeting Aesop, Dona Béatrice,
Pushkin, Anne Zingha, Aimé Césaire, Martin Luther King and many
others. These stars have allowed me to reject the idea that I am a
victim, to renew my faith in mankind and, above all, to believe in
myself. - Lilian Thuram This translation of Lilian Thuram's
bestselling 2010 volume, Mes Etoiles Noires , by Laurent
Dubois (University of Virginia), finally brings his anti-racism
work to the attention of an English-language audience (the book has
already been translated into several European languages). At a time
when the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us of the need to
tell more complex stories about our shared past, this volume
constitutes a timely intervention by a prominent black sporting
figure.
The controversy surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s third novel, Plateforme, has tended to overshadow critical examination of the text and, in particular, its engagement with contemporary tourist ...practices and the ways in which they inform and reflect Western attitudes to leisure time. This article illustrates how analysis of the novel’s portrayal of the tourist, and the ambiguous discourse that surrounds this figure, can reveal a certain depth and complexity in the novel’s contentious exploration of sex tourism and contemporary global relations. In literary terms, Plateforme’s play with its generic identity is a useful starting point for re-evaluating the criteria used to bracket fiction within distinct categories. Finally, acknowledging the text’s critical value can also provide an effective strategy for readers concerned with responding to the novel’s unquestionably offensive content.
In 1853, the writer and explorer Jacques Arago, who had been blind since 1837, published his Curieux voyage autour du monde sans la lettre A. For Nathalie Soloman, Arago's decision to combine the ...practical project of travelling with a sophisticated literary exercise neatly sums up what she sees as the unstable but fundamental relationship of nineteenth-century travel writing with the real. Faced with a readership increasingly familiar with these once unknown worlds, France's nineteenth-century travelling writers no longer sought to prove that travel writing was about discovery but instead shifted their emphasis from litteralite to litterarite.
The travelogues Carnets d'Amérique, septembre–novembre, 1974 by the Congolese author Valentin Y. Mudimbe, and Lettres d'Amériques by his compatriot Zamenga Batukezanga provide an important ...theoretical impetus for reconceptualising African intercontinental travel to the United States. Both texts recount sponsored journeys that took place in 1974 and 1981 respectively within the context of academic and cultural exchange programmes. As such, they provide an important African perspective on globalisation's American engine. Michel-Rolph Trouillet's ideas on the ruptures and connections between the current global order and previous imperial world orders serve to underscore the importance of developing a more historicised approach to globalisation. This is especially evident in the emphasis both authors place on American technology, an issue that emerges as paradigmatic of globalisation's reframing of the age-old question of African tradition versus Western modernity and that draws attention to the “differential temporalities” of globalisation as they overlap in the uneven cultural and economic spaces created by the very processes of globalisation. For both authors, however, Africa is not simply the powerless recipient of global cultural and economic trends but rather a dynamic partner in a complex process of mutual influence.
Assumptions regarding the form and content of travel writing mean this genre is widely understood to be structured according to the progressive stages of a journey and concerned primarily with actual ...topographies and cultural difference. In V.Y. Mudimbe's Cheminements: Carnets de Berlin (avril-juin, 1999), an unwillingness to conform to any of travel writing's usual conventions appears to exclude the text from any theoretical debate on this particular genre. However, this article argues that Cheminements has an invaluable role to play in critical processes that elaborate upon or interrogate commonplace understandings of travel and travel writing. In particular, Mudimbe's inattention to movement, distance and place suggest a rejection of a more widespread 'agoraphilic' standard of travel in favour of practices that allow for an entirely different encounter with the world.
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