Postcolonial Writers and Multiple Audiences: Hybridization, Linguistic Bivalency and (Resistant) Translations in Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

We propose polarity detection from colloquial expressions distinctive of a bilingual population. The hybrid language we address it's called "Jopara", composed by Spanish and Guaraní, spoken in Paraguay, similar to the "Louisiana's Creole" in the United States. We categorize polarity in three classes (positive, negative and neutral) and address this problem by applying both lexicon-based and machine-learning approaches. In this document it's shown the application scenario, the building process of the bilingual lexicon and the attributes preprocessing to create the classifiers' input. The input data is retrieved from Twitter so the expressions are similar to natural language. Finally, results are displayed to compare performance of these techniques when applied on this kind of language. It's shown that classical classifiers have very good performances, with correction rates of over 80% even with small training sets, if their parameters are properly adjusted along with an adequate selection of attributes.

Creole... English: West Indian Writing as Translation — This paper looks at the use of language(s) in Indo-Caribbean (i.e., West Indian of East Indian descent) writings. West Indian writers are Creole, in every sense of the term: born in (former) British colonies, they have a hybrid culture and a hybrid language. They operate from within a polylectal Creole language-culture continuum which offers them a wide and varied linguistic range (Creole to Standard English) and an extended cultural base ("primitive" oral culture to anglicized written culture). Indo-Caribbean writers, however, have access, not only to the Creole language-culture continuum, but also to the pre-colonial cultural, linguistic and religious traditions of their ancestors who came from India in the 19th century. But if Creole is the mother-tongue of all West Indians, English is the only language they know to read and write. West Indian literature in English constitutes an intricately woven textile of Creole and English : a hybrid writing made possible through the translation of Creole experience into English; oral Creole culture into written English; the Creole language into the English language. In fact, West Indian literature in English can be considered self-translation, for which the presence of the author as the translator gives authority to the hybridized product, a true extract of the West Indian writer and his Caribbean language-culture.

The present article intends to be an explanatory introduction, or translator’s preface, for Spanish-speaking audiences, to the postcolonial South African writer Pauline Smith (1882-1959) and, consequently, to this first translation of mine of one of her short stories, included in her book The Little Karoo (1925), into Spanish: Anna’s Marriage / La boda de Anna. An introduction or preface to the underlying cultural, social, political, linguistic and personal conflicts of a difficult and frequently tormented country and national literature that clearly deserve much more attention provided to them by those said Spanish-speaking audiences. Special emphasis will be devoted to the translation problems posed by the aforementioned difficulties, and to the translation strategies applied to deal with them successfully. The purposeful hybrid language, or original mixture of the Afrikaans and English languages, that Pauline Smith made use of, will be paid extra attention.

Hamid Ismailov is a prolific multilingual author, having written articles, stories, books of poetry and many novels in Russian, Uzbek, and English. He translated Uzbek classics into Russian, and Western and Russian literature into Uzbek. He also worked from Farsi into Russian. He was born into an Uzbek family in Tokmok, Kyrgyzstan, in 1954. He was educated in a Soviet secondary school and then military college. As a child, he read classical poetry and One Thousand and One Nights to his grandmother, who brought him up from the age of twelve. As an adult, Ismailov lived in Tashkent and then in Moscow where he championed Uzbek literature for the Writers Union. In 1992, he was forced to leave Uzbekistan because his poetry was found to be too “decadent,” but he later returned. In 2017, he was deported from Tashkent airport. His novels are still banned in Uzbekistan. After moving to western Europe, he lived in France for a short period of time and then moved to England where he worked at the bbc for twenty-five years. He was the first bbc Central Asia correspondent. In May 2010, he was appointed bbc World Service Writer-in-Residence and continued in this position until 2014. He currently lives in Prague. Natasha Rulyova studied Joseph Brodsky’s bilingualism and self-translation. She is now working on a project on Russophone Literary Diversity. She discusses with Ismailov his literary multilingualism, translation, postcolonial writers’ stereoscopic vision and his mission to diversify Russian-language culture. This written interview is based on Rulyova’s conversation with Ismailov, which took place online in English as part of the series “Natasha Rulyova’s Conversations with Russophone Authors,” co-organized with Pushkin House, London, on October 24, 2023 (available on the Pushkin House YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZSGoEx03U).

Editors' Preface:Thinking with Stories Cristina Bacchilega and Anne E. Duggan "Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict: A Conference in Fairy-Tale Studies" was held at Wayne State University, Detroit, August 2–5, 2017.1 The call for papers read, Conflict can give rise to violence but also to creativity. In the 1690s, French fairy-tale writers imagined through their fairy tales ideal resolutions to political conflict (Louis XIV's absolutism), as well as to conflict in conceptions of gender and marriage practices. The German tale tradition was transformed by the migration of French Huguenots to Germanic territories after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which prohibited the practice of Protestantism in France. The German Grimm Brothers drew from the tale tradition to create a cohesive notion of Germanic traditions and to contest French domination in the nineteenth century. Postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sofia Samatar draw from wonder tale traditions in ways that disrupt Western narrative traditions. And multimedia storytelling that dips both into history and the fantastic has advanced decolonial and social justice projects. These are only a few examples of the ways in which authors think with stories in times of conflict. With this conference we brought fairy-tale scholars together to reflect upon the genre in relation to questions that include but are not limited to migrants and migration in different geographical locations and historical periods; political and social upheaval; and transformations with an eye to alternative futures. One of our goals was to encourage a dialogue between creative and scholarly thinking with wonder tales in times of conflict. The conference gathered over fifty scholars and artists together from North America, Asia, [End Page 17] Australia, and Africa, and in its aftermath we were fortunate enough to forge a collaboration among the journal we coedit Marvels & Tales, the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), and Narrative Culture (NC) to publish essays that, in concert, promise to have a wide-ranging and international reach with scholars in multiple disciplines, including fairy-tale, folklore, and folk-narrative studies. Drawing together the pieces included in these special issues are three factors, all of which are interwoven within the seemingly simple and yet provocative statement "The truth about stories is that that's all we are" (King 2). These essays focus on stories that, while from different historical periods, cultures, and media, are all grounded in tradition—that is, extraindividual storytelling practices; work not so much at interpreting these stories, but at thinking through their affordances; and meditate on these stories as specifically situated cultural productions that intervene in material, ideological, political, and emotional conflicts.2 Methodologically, these essays are quite disparate. Some are written by scholars who identify as folklorists, but many are not. Some essays by nonfolklorists employ the tools of folkloristics, whereas others bring literary, media, gender, and indigenous studies, as well as creative strategies, to bear on our understanding of folktales, myths, and fairy tales, as well as indigenous genres from the Pacific such as mo'olelo and fāgogo. Each contribution recognizes the significant social functions that folk narratives hold across time and space, and collectively they speak to how no single methodology suffices to think with stories in different contexts. This is especially significant when the focus is not on the folktale and fairy tale as a shape-shifting narrative and cultural text per se, but on other wonder genres as well as on creative adaptations that mix genres. To think with stories rests in part on the understanding that the storyteller or artist is "always one step ahead of the scholar" (Nicolaisen 12), and on learning how—even more than what—stories tell about human interactions in the world and with one another; how we tell stories in different genres and cultures to overcome powerlessness, maintain privilege, or question accepted hierarchies. We focus on power and hierarchies because thinking with stories, as Jack Zipes comments in his JAF essay, occurs inevitably rather than exceptionally in times of conflict. Why in our call for papers did we emphasize thinking with rather than about stories? Just as current cognitive narrative theorists are focusing on the kinds...

Preface Cristina Bacchilega (bio) and Anne E. Duggan (bio) "Thinking with Stories in Times of Conflict: A Conference in Fairy-Tale Studies" was held at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, August 2–5, 2017.1 The call for papers read: Conflict can give rise to violence but also to creativity. In the 1690s, French fairy-tale writers imagined through their fairy tales ideal resolutions to political conflict (Louis XIV's absolutism), as well as conflict in conceptions of gender and marriage practices. The German tale tradition was transformed by the migration of French Huguenots to Germanic territories after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which prohibited the practice of Protestantism in France. The German Grimm Brothers drew from the tale tradition to create a cohesive notion of Germanic traditions and to contest French domination in the nineteenth century. Postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nalo Hopkinson, and Sofia Samatar draw from wonder tale traditions in ways that disrupt Western narrative traditions. And multimedia storytelling that dips both into history and the fantastic has advanced decolonial and social justice projects. [End Page 113] These are only a few examples of the ways in which authors think with stories in times of conflict. With this conference we brought fairy-tale scholars together to reflect on the genre in relation to questions that include but are not limited to migrants and migration in different geographical locations and historical periods, political and social upheaval, and transformations with an eye to alternative futures. One of our goals was to encourage a dialogue between creative and scholarly thinking with wonder tales in times of conflict. The conference gathered more than fifty scholars and artists together from North America, Asia, Australia, and Africa. In its aftermath we were fortunate enough to forge a collaboration among three journals—the one we coedit, Marvels & Tales (M&T), the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), and Narrative Culture—to publish essays that, in concert, promise to have a wide-ranging and international reach with scholars in multiple disciplines, including fairy-tale, folklore, and folk-narrative studies. Drawing together the pieces included in these special issues are three factors, all of which are interwoven in the seemingly simple and yet provocative statement "The truth about stories is that that's all we are" (King 2). These essays (1) focus on stories that, although from different historical periods, cultures, and media, are all grounded in tradition, that is, extra-individual storytelling practices; (2) work not so much at interpreting these stories, but at thinking through their affordances; and (3) meditate on these stories as specifically situated cultural productions that intervene in material, ideological, political, and emotional conflicts.2 Methodologically, these essays are quite disparate. Some are written by scholars who identify as folklorists, many are not. Some essays by nonfolklorists use the tools of folkloristics, and others bring literary, media, gender, and indigenous studies, as well as creative strategies, to bear on our understanding of folktales, myths, and fairy tales and indigenous genres from the Pacific such as moʻolelo and fāgogo. Each work recognizes the significant social functions that folk narratives hold across time and space, and collectively they speak to how no single methodology suffices to "think with stories" in different contexts. This is especially significant when the focus is not on the tale as a shape-shifting narrative and cultural text per se, but on other wonder genres and creative adaptations that mix genres. To think with stories rests partly on the understanding that the storyteller or artist is "always one step ahead of the scholar" (Nicolaisen 12), and on learning how—even more than what—stories tell about human interactions in the world [End Page 114] and with each other, how we tell stories in different genres and cultures to overcome powerlessness, maintain privilege, or question hierarchies. We focus on power and hierarchies because thinking with stories, as Jack Zipes comments in his JAF essay, occurs inevitably rather than exceptionally in times of conflict. Why did we emphasize thinking with rather than about stories? Just as current cognitive narrative theorists focus on the kinds of "thinking" afforded by stories, folklorists (see Noyes 2016...

This essay argues that the particular lens of Bakhtinian body theory as developed for the Robinsonade by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower will help to shed light on a process observable over the past fifty years, in which colonial and postcolonial authors first embraced and then quickly abandoned the technique of role reversal in drafting their castaway stories. Enamoured of its comedic potential, Adrian Mitchell wrote Man Friday (1973). Derek Walcott was somewhat more circumspect in his Pantomime (1978), based on the realisation that role reversal demands the ascription of univocal roles and identities, something he did not see in evidence in the creolised world of the Caribbean. Later colonial and postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Patrick Chamoiseau were then at pains to avoid questions of identity altogether, making epistemology and discourse their preferred topics. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the clichéd identities formerly applied to Indigenous peoples (physical strength, close connection to nature) could be brought to bear on the idea of nature itself, thus making animal Robinsonades such as Life of Pi (2001) and The Red Turtle (2016) tremendous successes that could forgo the messiness of human affairs and simply champion the everlasting superiority of nature over civilisation as an expression of contemporary environmental preoccupations.

Ever since the period of anti-colonial movements after the Second World War, and continuing through the period of decolonization of the 1960s, there have been movements to revalorize the use of local and indigenous languages, particularly in the context of literary expression. This was regarded as an essential part of the process of liberation from colonial dominance by the European powers, principally Britain and France, but also to a lesser extent Portugal. The movement is summed up in a famous article by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, writing in the context of emergent Kenyan nationalism, as ‘Decolonising the mind’. Ngũgĩ argued that it is only by writing in African languages that African writers will be able to connect with the values of their own culture. Not all African writers agreed, however: most notably, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe claimed that it was possible to adapt the colonial language to express the realities of the colonial situation from the point of view of the colonized peoples. Some fifty years on from the period of decolonization, it is clear that English and French remain the dominant languages of literary expression in the former colonies of Britain and France, and writing in one of the former colonial languages is often the only way to reach an international audience and to achieve some form of international recognition. Even so, the postcolonial and nationalist preference for writing in indigenous and local languages persists in the former colonies, in what has sometimes been called a situation of ‘literary diglossia’. In spite of the dominance of the colonial languages in official discourse, in the education systems, in the mass media, postcolonial writers still feel the need to defend their indigenous languages as a preferred vehicle for literary expression. One of the interesting features of this tendency is the role attributed to literary output, as opposed to the more vehicular uses of a local language: technical, scientific, educational, etc. Literary production is seen as the expression of a particular cultural sensibility, a set of values embodied in a language and celebrated in its literary deployment. It is sometimes assumed that a literary heritage confers a special prestige, a dignity, to what might otherwise be dismissed as a local particularity, a circumscribed cultural characteristic whose relevance is limited to a particular political or geographical area.

From 1986 to 1994, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant published a series of fictional and non-fictional writings focusing on language issues. Interest in these themes can certainly in part be explained by the surconscience linguistique that Lise Gauvin attributes to Francophone authors: a linguistic over-awareness which, in the case of these two Martiniquais writers, may be attributed to their Creole-French diglossia. Although we might believe that the idea of Gauvin is right, it doesn't seem enough to explain why the linguistic theme plays such a central role in Chamoiseau's and Confiant's works. Deeply influenced by Glissant's theories on Creole popular culture and Antillean literature (Le discours antillais), they conceived a Creolite poetics based on a primarly identity-based and geopolitical discourse. Declaring the need to build an authentically Creole literary discourse, one that finally expresses the Martiniquais reality, Chamoiseau and Confiant (as well as Bernabe, third and last author of Eloge de la creolite) found the «foundations of [their] being» in orality and its poetics in the Creole language. This belief was maily translated into their works in two ways: by representing the (diglossic) relationships occurring between their first languages (Creole and French) and by representing the Creole parole (orality) and its function. An analysis of our authors' literary and theoretical writings will enable us to show how two works that develop around the same themes and thesis have in fact produced very divergent results, which were perhaps already perceivable in the main ambiguities of their common manifestos.

The accomplishments of Miriam Masoli Tlali are remarkable given the repressive conditions under which she wrote. Tlali was the first black woman to publish a novel in South Africa during the period of racial segregation enforced by the National Party beginning in 1948. Her postcolonial writings, translated into several languages, include novels, short stories, journalistic writings, interviews, and one play. It is largely through the literary efforts of writers such as Tlali, Bessie Head, Noni Jabavu, Ellen Kuzwayo, Sindiwe Magona, and Lauretta Ngcobo that the particular challenges of black women under apartheid became known to local and international audiences. Despite writing during a state of emergency and being constantly harassed by apartheid's spies, Tlali bravely put pen to paper for the greater good of her society. She co‐founded an African press, Skotaville, as well as the radical anti‐apartheid literary magazine, Staffrider , for which she wrote a column titled “Soweto Speaking.”

Reviewed by: Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy Riki Traum Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 360 pp. "Who will tell our story? We, who walk upon this night, driven out of place and myth. The myth that could not find a single one among us to testify that the crime had not taken place. If we are not we, then they are not they. But particulars are particulars—the thief's pretext." —Mahmoud Darwish1 Edward Said introduced the idea that postcolonial writers bear their past within them as "re-interpretable and re-deployable experiences in which the formerly silent native speaks and acts on territory taken back from the colonialist."2 His words resonate decades later, in the works of Israeli and Palestinian writers and poets. In many ways, Lital Levy's Poetic Trespass, which studies the inseparable paths of Hebrew and Arabic, starts exactly where the silent native Palestinian or Jewish writer locates the appropriate linguistic "territory" and speaks. Poetic Trespass profoundly identifies linguistic liminality within Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli literature and its interrelation with Mizraḥi literature. It brings together historical moments in which the past is abruptly taken and consequently dies, and the future is yet to be born and is hence questionable. In this context, the nakba, for the Palestinians, and the immigration to Israel, for Jews, are two focal and vivid examples. For Levy, however, this liminal stage creates poetic possibilities that deserve special scholarly attention. Moreover, these experiences have become points of encounter where a literary text meets its other, and historical circumstances generate circles of linguistic identity, by their own merits and crucial impact. The attention that Levy draws to this hyperawareness of language to its Other and to itself, as well as the different representations of this hyperawareness, unveils a crucial aspect in the contemporary Israeli politics of identity. In this context, the book presents Mizraḥi writers and poets who resist the politics of identity by rendering their linguistic identity as an open and heterogenic space.3 Levy then examines different linguistic strategies and practices emerge amid displacement of ethnocentric domain and recreate poetic visions and possibilities. No-man's-land, [End Page 331] a saturated term that becomes a theme in the book, becomes a palpable metaphor of the book's zone of study and exploration; "The cultural space of in-betweenness, encompassing contact zone and no-man's-land" (12). Although Levy anchors the term in its scholarly context, she clearly uses it as a zone and form of resistance and subversion. Poetic Trespass studies the complex multi-layered dialogue between Hebrew and Arabic and the cultural functions and meanings of Arabic in Modern Hebrew literature. This no-man's-land can be seen as the "forsaken zone" between Hebrew and Arabic, where writers and poets wander between the two languages, but also create alternative standpoints and political stances. At the foundation of the book lies the presumption that the migration between Hebrew and Arabic opens new cultural-cum-political "redemptive" possibilities, beyond the narrowly national ones, "where writers transgress the boundaries of language and identity inscribed in sociopolitical codes of the state" (3). This poetic insight is refreshing in itself and requires the clarification of the book's two conceptual axes. The first axis is the "hyperlanguage" that Levy coins and describes as "excessively performative, self-aware literary language" (12). Hyperlanguage is the exact dialogized state between Hebrew and Arabic which anchors the literary works discussed in Poetic Trespass in a wider socio-political concept. It is employed at different levels of visibility, but it illuminates the creative state of mind of its writer, who links "the political and the metaphysical." The second axis is the literature of no-man's-land, the subject of the book, and a literature that emerges in the bilingual interaction between the two languages. No-man's-land, in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in their relationship, evokes simultaneously political and mental intersections while translating the unclaimed and abstract political zone into a palpable and visible literary space, now inhabited by the...

In his first play, Une Manière d'Antigone (1975), Patrick Chamoiseau brings together Greek mythology and the history of Martinique. This article compares this version with the Sophoclean version, considering the transformations made by the Martinican playwright in terms of time and space, plot, characters and language so as to determine how different or similar the Caribbean Antigone is from her Greek sister. By adapting a famous Greek myth on the Antillean stage, Chamoiseau realizes a literary transposition while reaffirming his strong political opposition towards France. This play inscribes itself in the vast movement of subversion and contestation of the classic literary tradition by postcolonial writers who create their own literature based on the adaptation of Western classics. Chamoiseau's rewriting of the Antigone myth allows for a reappropriation and a revalorization of a forgotten history. Additionally, it presents an assertion of resistance and a plea for emancipation from both literary and political domination.

One of the central claims made on behalf of postcolonial literature by critics and theorists of postcolonial literature is that this literature highlights the cultural identity of the different nations and communities it represents. In opposition to the idea of the universality of cultural values, which was long upheld in Western literary criticism, particularly in what is defined as liberal humanist criticism, postcolonial writers and critics emphasise the need to recognise and respect cultural differences among and between people. Imposing a single set of cultural norms upon all the people in the world, they argue, is unjust and unfair and leads to domination of the many by the few. From this perspective, all communities and nations have the right to live by their own cultural values and norms and no culture is superior to any other. This emphasis on cultural difference has given prominence to the idea of cultural relativism, which sees each culture as distinct and whole in itself and, therefore, not open to be judged and evaluated by the values and norms of another culture. Thus, in postcolonial literature, universalism is rejected in favour of cultural relativism. This paper discusses the possibility of reconciling universalism with cultural difference in postcolonial theory and literature and refers to the works of such pioneering critics of postcolonial literature as Franz Fanon and Edward Said to develop it. In light of the views of Fanon and Said, the paper offers a reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to highlight the interplay of cultural difference and universality in the novel. Fanon and Said were both very eloquent and committed critics of colonialism and the universalist ideology colonialism had espoused to undermine colonised cultures. However, both also remained committed to humanism and argued for redefining and reasserting humanism to counter colonialism. It is in their humanist thought that this paper aims to find the grounds for bringing together cultural difference and universalism in postcolonial literature. Keywords: Cosmopolitanism, culture, humanism, postcolonial theory, universalism

Adaptation is one of the fertile grounds of literary scholars both in criticisms and writing. And there is no doubt that series of literary figures have succeeded in this both nationally and internationally. It is also an avenue for discourses and counter-discourses thereby engendering the scope of literature. Writers like Ola Rotimi, Femi Osofisan, Olu Obafemi among others have excelled in this regard making references to Western literary works intertextually to foreground their ideologies and the literary world in turn gives them attention. The purpose of the paper is to explore the adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello by the Nigerian playwright, Ahmed Yerima and examine the intertextuality of Othello in the construction of Yerima’s Otaelo. The paper gives insights into the European and African cultural backgrounds of the two playwrights and their influences on the construction of both plays. It is thus discovered that the field of adaption in literary discourse helps to unravel lots of meanings in the original text of adaption and at the same time reflecting the socio-politcal and cultural tradition of the adopted culture. Therefore, this paper posits that postcolonial writers who parody European texts should not stop at just trying to rewrite the texts but find a means of making such works fit into African realities. There is no gainsaying about the fact that Armed Yerima, through improvisation, produced a play that successfully plants a European text on African soil.

Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizing processes, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theories concerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking Patrick Chamoiseau's theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, I argue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle of generic creolization. This is evident in the novel's intermixing of the detective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, the hard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. By manipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, the hard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator are characterized, Chamoiseau's narrative turns from an investigation into one man's death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and the workings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifique and its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, I conclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasingly relevant to understanding a world in which genre's radiating and rhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences.