Taking Liberties: Loose Translation Across the Black Diaspora

Abstract

Taking Liberties: Loose Translation Across the Black Diaspora develops a theory of “loose translation” – a practice of interpretation that both diverges significantly from the meaning or form of an “original” text and operates as a tool for exposing and critiquing anti-Black narratives. Taking Liberties tracks loose translation in the lives and works of four Black cultural producers from the 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean. This project pushes the limits of what constitutes a text, featuring translations of literature, aesthetics, race, archival material, and gender. In so doing, it develops a richer understanding of translation as a practice that transgresses boundaries. Chapter one, “Lost in Translation: Or, R. R. Madden’s ‘Life of the Negro Poet’ and the Authorial Displacement of Juan Francisco Manzano,” examines ex-enslaved Cuban Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography and the 1840 English translation that drastically reconstructed the text, revealing and reinventing the mechanics of white editorial control over Black narratives. Chapter two, “Translation Errors: The Accidental Mistranslations of Arturo Schomburg’s Ethno-racial Identity,” argues that misapprehensions (or accidental loose translations) of Afro-Puerto Rican historian Arturo Schomburg’s ethno-racial identity reveal evolving notions of Blackness in the early 20th-century US. Chapter three, “Embodied Translation: Eusebia Cosme’s Performative Revisions of Race and Gender in Negrista Poetry,” reads actor Eusebia Cosme’s performances of negrista poetry as “embodied translations” that disrupted the Modernist fetishization of Black women’s bodies. Chapter four, “Translating Against the Archive: Violence and Translation in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière…noire de Salem,” analyzes Maryse Condé’s translated excerpts from the Salem Witchcraft Papers in her novel, Moi, Tituba…Sorcière noire de Salem. Condé wields translation to critically revise the testimony of Tituba, centering Tituba’s subjecthood and challenging the archival marginalization of enslaved women. Ultimately, Taking Liberties contests the notion of translation as a neutral, invisible process; traces Black diasporic life, identity, and resistance through the lens of translation; and offers loose translation as a socio-political praxis toward freedom that dares to reimagine what is.