Race, resistance and translation: the case of John Buchan’s UPrester John

In postcolonial translation studies, increasing attention is being given to the asymmetrical relationships between dominant and indigenous languages. This paper argues that John Francis Cele’s UPrester John (1958), is not simply a subordinated and obeisant translation of John Buchan’s adventure thriller Prester John (1910), but a more complex form of textuality that is both oppositional and complicit with the workings of apartheid. Although Cele’s translation reproduces Buchan’s story of a daring young Scotsman who single-handedly quells a black nationalist uprising, it also ameliorates the novel’s racist language and assumption. Cele’s translation practice is examined in the context of apartheid publishing and Bantu education.Web of Scienc

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Inhabiting the Metropole: C. L. R. James and the Postcolonial Intellectual of the African Diaspora

Despite the call for a “proliferation of historically nuanced theories and strategies”; despite talk about “traditions” as “invented” entities which entail a “selective remembering and forgetting of the past that undergirds group identity”; despite the recognition that histories and identities are necessarily constructed; despite the call not to “give in to the rigidity and interdictions of those self-imposed limitations that come with race, moment or milieu”; despite all these, a significant strand in discussions of anticolonial resistance, whether in homeland or diaspora, often pits simplistic notions of dispersed and colonized peoples’ (African, Indian, or Caribbean) national identity and cultural authenticity against the discourses and values that authorize the power of the West. This strand reflects an understandable, but ultimately mistaken, desire for resistance to occupy an absolutely autonomous, uncontaminated space from which to launch the “truth” of its “pure” opposition to the West. Drawing upon the power of nationalist rhetoric, it implicitly or explicitly posits “true” resistance as proceeding from (and only from) identities securely and organically connected to a putative traditional natal culture. </jats:p