Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures ─ Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts

This book explores postcolonial literatures from a translational perspective and argues that postcolonial studies should become a discourse of and on translation in order to be responsive to the complexity of the textuality, and even the literariness, of postcolonial texts. In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume considers translation a basic feature of postcolonial cultures, using translation scholarship as a critical tool for approaching postcolonial textuality. It makes a timely and strategic intervention into debates in literary studies (especially postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and world literature) as well as in discussions of globalization and cosmopolitanism, carrying out the convergence of the linguistic and literary approaches to postcolonial literatures by joining them with translation studies. The volume asks what happens when we acknowledge hearing more than one language in the background when reading a postcolonial writer, and what kind of reading is demanded by a textuality that explicitly toys with several languages. An impressive group of scholars in the field contribute original essays in what will be an important contribution to postcolonial studies on the whole.

Simona Bertacco is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Milan, Italy.