[Un]Muffled Histories

Abstract

This article focuses on the translating practices of people of African descent and Amerindians in the early modern Caribbean. The history of translation processes in the interconnected constellation of islands and shorelines that constituted the early modern Caribbean provides a framework for thinking about translation that exists outside analytical models based on notions of subalterities, center-periphery, or “contact zones.” Narratives about translation based on imperial and colonial dynamics, or those that depend on the divides between nature and culture Europeans ideated in the seventeenth century, are not apposite for uncovering the history of medical translation in the Caribbean. By stepping outside of these narratives, this article shows how, in the early modern Caribbean, a multitude of people—Caribbean Amerindians, and migrants, mostly kidnapped people from Africa and their descendants—developed rich communal processes of translation around bodily matters.