Space and Place in Translation: Postcolonial Geographies in the work of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé

这个为期七个月的项目考察了两位著名的加勒比海小说家威尔逊·哈里斯和玛丽斯·孔戴在他们的作品中对空间和地点进行理论性的特殊方式，并询问这与他们特殊的语言使用，包括英语/法语和克里奥尔语之间的翻译有什么关系。圭亚那作家威尔逊·哈里斯近半个世纪以来一直在出版富有远见和诗意的小说。他的作品将加勒比海作为欧洲、非洲和亚洲文化形式与古代美洲文化的交汇点进行沉思，这些文化在殖民主义时期几乎被根除。Maryse Condé来自瓜德罗普，在她的作品中，她反思了散居在非洲-加勒比地区的身份和地位之间经常存在的创伤和悬而未决的交叉切割，因此她的作品的背景追溯并重新追溯了非洲、加勒比、欧洲和北美之间的路线。该项目汇集了后殖民研究领域三个不同学科分支的见解和方法：文学理论、翻译研究和人文地理学。对殖民主义遗产的延伸批判是后殖民研究的基础，在文学理论中表现为作家在试图表达当代关系和身份的复杂组合方面的创新意识的增强。这一创新采取了一系列叙事风格的形式，这些风格无视魔幻现实主义或寓言等类别的分类，有时在时间和空间中令人眼花缭乱地移动，以及一系列相互并行的语言形式。后殖民翻译研究关注后一种现象，认为语言在殖民时代和独立后时代的统治和边缘化是有政治原因的，并认识到如果研究者密切关注现代生活中频繁发生的从一种语言到另一种语言的翻译的具体情况，就会揭示出一系列关于意义的斗争。后殖民地理学带来了一系列关于空间关系的理论，以及关注关于地方的意义和身份的斗争的传统，作为进一步理解哈里斯和孔戴等作家颠覆对空间和地方的传统理解的方式的手段。因此，本项目通过将加勒比海小说作为空间理论的场所来扩展对空间理论与非裔美国文学之间的联系的洞察。本项目旨在展示两件事：首先，通过关注哈里斯和孔戴的S作品中语言、空间和地点之间的关系，可以更好地理解他们作品中关于后殖民意义和身份的斗争；其次，这些加勒比小说可以被认真地视为空间理论创新发生的文化语境。在方法上，该项目深入探索了六部小说：威尔逊·哈里斯的《孔雀宫》(1960)、《琼斯敦》(1996)和《记忆的幽灵》(2006)，以及玛丽斯·孔戴的《赫雷马霍农》(1976)、《新世界》(1993)和《莫伊，蒂图巴，黑色索尔塞姆》(1986)。该项目分为四个阶段：1.简要文献回顾，重点是加勒比文学理论，特别是关于哈里斯和孔戴的理论；加勒比翻译研究；以及后殖民地理学。2.初步语言分析，将编目每部小说所使用的各种语言形式，特别是不同形式的英语/法语和克里奥尔语之间的翻译和相互作用。初步的论述分析，将对空间/地点的描述方式进行分类，以及这种方式与小说语言使用之间的相互关系。理论化、写作和传播，这将汇集与空间理论有关的语言和话语分析。这项工作将在两次会议上发表，并在两篇期刊文章中发表。

This seven-month project examines the particular ways in which two prominent Caribbean novelists - Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé - theorise space and place in their work, and asks how this relates to their particular use of language, including translations between English/French and creole. The Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, has been publishing visionary and poetic novels for almost half a century. His work meditates on the Caribbean as a meeting place between European, African and Asian cultural forms and the ancient American cultures that they all but eradicated during colonialism. Maryse Condé is from Guadeloupe, and in her work she reflects on the often traumatic and unresolved cross-cuttings of identity and place in the African-Caribbean diaspora, so the settings for her work trace and re-trace routes between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and North America.The project draws together insights and methodologies from three different branches of the interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies: literary theory, translation studies and human geography. The extended critique of the legacy of colonialism that is the basis for postcolonial studies comes through in literary theory as a heightened awareness of writers' innovation in trying to express the complex mix of contemporary relationships and identities. This innovation takes the form of a range of narrative styles that defy classification into categories such as magical realism or allegory, moving sometimes dizzily through time and space, as well as a range of language forms operating alongside each other. Postcolonial translation studies focuses on this latter phenomenon, arguing that there is a politics to the dominance and marginalisation of languages in the colonial and post-independence eras, and recognising that if the researcher focuses closely on the specifics of the frequent translations from one language to another that occur in modern life, a range of struggles over meaning will be revealed. Postcolonial geography brings in a range of theories about spatial relationships, as well as a tradition of focusing on struggles over the meaning and identity of places, as a means of further understanding the ways in which writers like Harris and Condé subvert conventional understandings of space and place. This project therefore extends insights into connections between spatial theory and African-American literature, by looking specifically at Caribbean writing as a site for spatial theory.This project aims to show two things then: firstly that the struggles over postcolonial meaning and identity in Harris and Condé's work can be better understood by focusing on the relationships between language, space and place in their work; and secondly that these Caribbean novels can be taken seriously as cultural contexts in which innovations in spatial theory take place. Methodologically, the project is an in-depth exploration of six novels: Palace of the Peacock (1960), Jonestown (1996), and The Ghost of Memory (2006), by Wilson Harris; and Hérémakhonon (1976), La Colonie du Nouveau Monde (1993), and Moi, Tituba, Sorcière Noire de Salem (1986), by Maryse Condé. The project has four stages:1. Brief literature review, focusing on Caribbean literary theory, in particular around Harris and Condé; Caribbean translation studies; and postcolonial geographies. 2. Preliminary linguistic analysis, which will catalogue the range of language forms used in each of the novels, in particular the translations and interactions between different forms of English/French and creoles.3. Preliminary discursive analysis, which will catalogue the ways in which space/place are described, and the inter-relationships between this and the novels' language use.4. Theorisation, writing and dissemination, which will bring together the linguistic and discursive analysis in relation to spatial theory. The work will be presented at two conferences and in two journal articles.