Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations

8. Coloniality, Performance, Translation: The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America

177 chapte r e i ght Coloniality, Performance, Translation The Embodied Public Sphere in Early America Elizabeth Maddock Dillon M W hat is left over when the act of linguistic translation is complete? What are translation’s remnants—the bodily remains of translation ? These are questions of more than passing concern with regard to American culture, and this is so because American/U.S. culture originates in a scene of colonial encounter. The scene of encounter involves translation—building a bridge of meaning that traverses languages between colonizer and colonized, between European, Native American, and African persons—but the scene of encounter highlights the extent to which translation is always shot through with operations of power and violence . Translation, at this original moment, involves the creation of shared meaning but it simultaneously generates silence and erasure in its wake. And what of these erasures, these silences? How do they linger, or remain as foundational in the creole culture that is American? Embodied Remains The word lagniappe, used today primarily in the vicinity of New Orleans in the creole Louisiana dialect, derives from the Spanish phrase, “la ñapa” which means “something added” or a gift. In vernacular usage, it refers to a tip or extra bonus that exceeds the fixed terms of a sales transaction, like the thirteenth doughnut in a baker’s dozen. It is a little something extra, added on the side—something beyond the calculus of contract and the cash nexus of capitalism. In his book Creoles of Louisiana (1884), George Washington 178 elizabeth maddock dillon Cable gives an account of the etymology of this word—an etymology that involves a history of translation and imperialism as well as bodily remains. Cable writes, The Spanish occupation [of New Orleans] never became more than a conquest. The Spanish tongue, enforced in the courts and principal public offices, never superseded the French in the mouths of the people, and left but a few words naturalized in the corrupt French of the slaves . . . [T]he terrors of the calaboza, with its chains and whips and branding irons, were condensed into the French tri-syllabic calaboose; while the pleasant institution of ñapa—the petty gratuity added, by the retailer, to anything bought—grew the pleasanter, drawn out into Gallicized lagniappe” (Cable 1884, 114). According to this account, a number of translations are embedded within the etymology of the word lagniappe—translations from French to Spanish , and from the mouths of colonizers to the mouths of colonized African slaves. But the linguistic colonization of Spanish is incomplete—it does not ever fully take hold, Cable tells us—and, in any case, the Spanish depart from Louisiana, making way for other waves upon waves of colonization, by the French, again, and later by U.S. Anglophone culture. What is left behind—“in the mouths of the people”—to use Cable’s wonderful phrase, are a few leftover words: calaboose, lagniappe. The very word lagniappe is thus itself something of an embodied remainder, a little something extra left over from acts of colonial translation, a material remnant left on the tongues of those inhabiting the colony when the colonizers depart. As Cable ’s etymology of lagniappe points out, translation is not just a matter of passing words from one language to another, but also involves the power to determine whose words, and whose language will be the bearer of legitimate meaning. The etymology of the word lagniappe thus speaks to the way in which translation is a matter of power—a matter of speaking in the place of something (say, another language) or in the place of someone else. And yet, the remnants of such imposed substitutions and erasures do not wholly disappear; the violence of colonial translation generates its own particular embodied remains. In this essay, I turn to the scene of colonial encounter as a scene of translation . And notably, I am as interested in the degree to which colonial en- Coloniality, Performance, Translation 179 counter is a scene—an embodied performance—as the extent to which this encounter concerns translation, linguistic force, and erasure. More specifically , I sketch a New World genealogy of theatricalized colonial encounters , beginning with Prospero and Caliban’s encounter in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and following its permutations in John Dryden and William Davenant’s The Enchanted Island (1667), through Daniel Defoe’s scene of encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719...