How Postcolonial Translation Theory Transforms Francophone African Studies

The metaphor of translation as a “carrying across” of meaning between texts and cultures has often been used to explore the ways in which the West’s “cultural others” present themselves to a dominant Western, receiving, “target” culture through the hegemonic languages of empire, ostensibly for hegemonic Western audiences. This is of course the pattern described by the philosophy of translatio studii et imperii, the putative geographic movement westward of both learning and empire. Likewise, in discussing the work of francophone African writers, critics have often assumed a similar translational model of writing that is uni-directional, a carrying-across that moves only from the (post)colony to the West, from South to North. As Anuradha Dingwaney puts it, “translation is … the vehicle though which ‘Third World’ cultures (are made to) travel—transported or ‘borne across’ to and recuperated by audiences in the West” (4).

In its inattention to reciprocal cultural exchange, however, this model effectively forecloses on the role of the writer as literary and cultural agent because it relies on the notion of translation as an “ancillary” activity where the writer-as (derivative)-translator works in the “service” of one or another cultural “master.” Moradewum Adejunmobi asserts that this type of thinking is even shared by some African writers who may “continue to present their European-language texts as derivative … because a widespread conception prevails among African writers and critics of African literature according to which only versions in indigenous African languages can be truly African” (168). Indeed, Adejunmobi’s essay, “Translation and Postcolonial Identity: African Writing and European Languages” perspicaciously explores the “persistent nostalgia for ‘origins,’ ‘original languages,’ and … ‘original identities’ in issues surrounding translation and contemporary African literature” (163).

It is this type of originary thinking that often leads (Western) readers of francophone African literature to assume that because the work was written in French, the intended audience is therefore located in the métropole and beyond, to the exclusion of local readers. For example, in his introduction to Sartre’s “What is Literature and Other Essays,” Steven Ungar claims that Sartre’s Orphée noir, the preface to L.S. Senghor’s Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache, “allows Sartre to mediate on behalf of Senghor and the poets in order to address the white European readers for whom the anthology is intended” (12, emphasis added). Similarly, Madeleine Borgomano assumes that, because francophone African women write in French, their texts are addressed to “l’autre, l’homme blanc, l’étranger” “the other, the White man, the foreigner” (Voix 32). This type of thinking about francophone African literature as a literature which is unidirectional tends to deny the “flux” of translational exchange. It is reminiscent of what Talal Asad first identified as the violence of ethnographic authority in cultural translation and the determination of cultural meaning in a Western context. In his seminal 1986 essay, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” Asad shows that the authority of the ethnographer “is inscribed in the institutionalized forces of industrial capitalist society … which are constantly tending to push the meanings of various Third World societies in a single direction” (163). However, as Douglas Robinson observes, while the translatio is in constant geographical drift, its movement is not necessarily westward: “translation itself must repeatedly be retranslated …, which has the effect of grounding it not in stability but in flux” (55).

Just as the field of Translation Studies has moved beyond examining “the translations themselves” (although this certainly continues to be an essential component of Translation Studies) toward a “cultural turn” that emphasizes the centrality of translation in cultural history, so the “postcolonial turn” in Translation Studies has turned toward an examination of the many facets of linguistic and cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial contexts.¹ For example, in Translation as Reparation. Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa, Paul Bandia compares the dynamics of translation to a “Middle Passage,” where, in the writing of postcolonial African writers, the interaction between indigenous languages and cultures and colonial languages such as French and English undermine conventional notions of translation as the transfer of...