New Book: The Caribbean in Translation – Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, The Caribbean in Translation – Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford, Vienna : Peter Lang, 2020).
This book investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literatures in translation. Covering three of the largest linguistic areas of the region, the so-called English, French and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the volume offers a comparative study of the region’s literary output across a variety of genres, including poems, novels, short stories and essays. Caribbean texts and their translations are analysed through the prism of the threshold, which serves a dual purpose: on a textual level, thresholds correspond to paratextual elements (e.g. prefaces, afterwords, foot/endnotes, glossaries, blurbs…) that are used by various cultural agents to frame Caribbean literatures for global, regional and local audiences. On a broader level, thresholds, which both open into but also signal a limit or break, allow the author to examine and remap routes of (non) circulation for Caribbean literatures within regional, national and transnational frameworks. Analysing liminality alongside Glissantian notions that interrogate authorship, transparency, originality and hospitality in translation, the book tests the applicability of relational thinking to the imperatives of translation and literary circulation. Ultimately, the author asks whether traditional core-periphery models of global literary traffic can be challenged, inviting the reader to envisage alternative pathways of cultural exchange for and from Southern, archipelagic latitudes.
This book was the winner of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Comparative Literature.
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert completed a PhD in Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in 2018. She is a practising literary translator and has worked as an instructor of French and English at the University of Warwick (2015-2017) and Université de La Réunion (2017-2020), respectively. Her current research investigates Caribbean literatures in translation and focuses on bibliodiversity and non-centric modes of circulation for Caribbean and Indian Ocean literatures. The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation is her first monograph.
