Colonial Enterprise Research Articles

Ceh'e3teekuu! —Listen—This is Arapaho Land

We know about the rapid loss of our world's plants, animals and wilderness but few of us are aware of the parallel, perhaps more rapid and equally devastating, extinction of our planet's human cultural diversity and ongoing cultural genocide. The Vision Quest-University of Wyoming (VQ-UWYO) project addresses the physical occupation of Arapaho lands and the concomitant erasure of Arapaho culture as evidenced by the critically endangered status of the Arapaho language. VQ-UWYO is an augmented reality (AR) mobile place-based learning game that teaches Arapaho language and culture on the UWYO campus. The affordances of mobile technology in general and mapping and locative technologies like the global positioning system (GPS) in particular are present-day extensions of the European colonial enterprise of map making which named, mapped and thereby claimed ownership of the entire world. VQ-UWYO uses these same technologies to push back against the tide of cultural genocide and re-anchor Arapaho place names, language and culture to the UWYO campus. The foundational assumption that the land that is now the UWYO campus was a terra nullius to be freely taken, occupied and used is being challenged in order to begin to heal generations and centuries of colonialization and oppression perpetrated on first peoples in general and upon the Arapaho Nation in particular. The VQ-UWYO project seeks new ways to speak the truths of the past so that we as individuals and as a campus community can finally stand on equal ground.

Social sciences, modernization, and late colonialism: The Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa.

In Portugal, studies of transformations since the mid-1950s in colonial social research have focused on the colonial school in Lisbon or other bodies directly under the supervision of the metropolitan administration. Nonmetropolitan initiatives have been neglected and the social-scientific undertakings of the Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa (CEGP), in particular, have been only marginally dealt with. This article maps CEGP's creation in Bissau, in 1945, and its social-scientific activity not only to establish its precedence but also to highlight local colonial enterprise and to specify its imprint upon developments in the metropole. It addresses CEGP's immediate context and main actors, institutional setting, research activities, publications, and other scientific outlets, to then put forward some concluding remarks regarding the epistemic reach of overseas governmental measures and the practical effects, in metropolitan colonial policies and scientific research, of peripheral imperial bureaucratic knowledge.

La minería colonial y las raíces del Capitaloceno: Habitus extractivista y mineralización de la condición humana

Este artículo propone un análisis de la minería moderno colonial como un detonante fundamental del Capitaloceno. Se busca mostrar cómo la irrupción de ese tipo histórico específico de explotación de las “riquezas” minerales de la Tierra, nacida de la invasión y conquista del “Nuevo Mundo”, desencadenó toda una serie de grandes desplazamientos no sólo geológicos sino también antropológicos (ecobiopolíticos) que terminaron finalmente desembocando en lo que hoy comprendemos como la Era del Capitaloceno.Como motor clave de la empresa colonial, la minería de metales preciosos practicada intensivamente a partir del siglo XVI ha involucrado una drástica alteración geosociometabólica sobre la faz de la Tierra. El ritmo y volumen de los flujos de minerales movilizados, extraídos (de unos territorios) y luego desplazados y procesados (en otros lejanos destinos geográficos y usos sociales), ha ido creando no sólo la cartografía económica y política propia de la Modernidad colonial que hoy habitamos; no sólo ha ido transformando la composición, morfología y dinámica de las capas geológicas y de la atmósfera del planeta, sino que también, ha afectado decisivamente la propia composición y (auto)comprensión de lo humano; al fin y al cabo, componente también de la Tierra.

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, by Herman L. BennettBlacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, by John Monteiro

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, by Herman L. BennettBlacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America, by John Monteiro

The psychoanalytic encounter with settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel

AbstractThe paper explores the relationship between the legacy of Western imperialism and the complicity of the “international community” in the settler colonial project taking place in Palestine/Israel. It analyzes some key aspects of Western discourse that inhibit an appreciation of non‐Zionist perspectives, and which obstruct action to challenge the systemic human rights abuses to which Palestinians are subject. It argues that psychoanalysis, as a discipline and a profession, participates in a wider societal failure, adapting itself to priorities that conflict with its ostensible ethical foundations. Recent years have seen a strengthening of the worldwide movement in support of Palestinian rights in general, and the growth of activism within the mental health community in particular. The exchanges between activists and mainstream professional organizations are here interrogated to identify key points of contention. The paper considers the impact of the settler colonial enterprise on Israeli society as a whole, and on the politics of Israeli psychoanalysis, to support the argument that neutrality is not an option for the international mental health community. It concludes that principled engagement initiatives are necessary to meet mental health workers' professional responsibilities to do no harm, and to contribute to the future health of the relationship between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli societies.

History, Sovereignty, Capital: Company Colonization in South Australia and New Zealand

AbstractThis article takes a fresh look at the history of private colonial enterprise in order to show how companies influenced British settlement and emigration to South Australia and New Zealand in the 1830s, thus connecting the settler revolution to global capitalism. Bringing into a single analytical frame the history of company colonization in the antipodes and its Atlantic predecessor, it examines how and why the actors involved in the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand invoked North American precedent to justify their early nineteenth-century colonial ventures. The article shows how the legitimating narratives employed by the colonial reformers performed two key functions. On the one hand, they supplied a historical and discursive tradition that authorized chartered enterprise in the antipodes. On the other hand, they furnished legal arguments that purportedly justified the appropriation of Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land. In illuminating how language and time shaped the world-making prophesies of these colonial capitalists, the article aims to extend recent work on corporations in global context.

Climates of Change: A Tuatara’s-Eye View

The tuatara or New Zealand “spiny-backed lizard” (Sphenodon punctatus) is the sole surviving member of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. Among its characteristics and peculiarities, the tuatara is renowned for being slow-breathing and long-lived; it possesses a third eye on the top of its skull for sensing ultraviolet light; and the sex of its progeny is determined by soil temperatures. This article unravels a tuatara’s-eye view of climate change, considering this creature’s survival across geological epochs, its indigenous lineage and its sensitivities to the fast-shifting conditions of the Anthropocene. This article examines the tuatara’s evolving role as an icon of biodiversity-under-threat and the evolving role of zoos and sanctuaries as explicators of climate change, forestallers of extinction, and implementers of the reproductive interventions that are increasingly required to secure the future of climate-vulnerable species. It is also interested in the tuatara as a witness to the rapid and ongoing human-wrought climate change which has secured the lifeworld reconstruction that is foundational to the settler colonial enterprise in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Linking this to the Waitangi Tribunal’s Wai 262 report (Ko Aotearoa Tēnei, 2011), the article considers what the tuatara teaches about kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and climates of change.

Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America

Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America

Inventing Narratives, Inventorying Natural Resources: Colonial Economic Exploitation in Conrad’s Malay Fiction

Literary narratives had accompanied global economic exploitation of natural resources since the rise of Britain as an imperial force in the late sixteenth century marked by Thomas Hariot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), in which Hariot narrates, describes, and inventories natural and human resources in Virginia to invite economic interest and to justify colonization. The tradition of writing a descriptive overview of conquered lands was then furthered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) and Raffles’s History of Java (1817) as British colonial rule extended to the Malay Archipelago. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, as economic and political rule inevitably gave way to complex socio-cultural interaction, the fiction of Joseph Conrad set in the Archipelago, being novelistic in nature, provides a more dialogic portrayal of British colonial presence, particularly in Java and Borneo, which goes beyond mere justification for the exploitation of local resources. Following the cue from the work Edward Said in identifying textualization as a mode of colonial intellectual domination and Benita Parry in revealing the “ghostly” presence of empire in colonial fiction, I would like to argue that Conrad’s Malay fiction both justifies and problematizes the relationship between British colonial enterprise and the natural as well as socio-cultural environment in the Archipelago.

The British Southern Cameroons Health Services as an Appendage to Nigerian Health Sector, 1922-1961

The incidence of disease on the colonial agenda triggered the development of healthcare services by colonial administrations in Africa. In Southern Cameroons, the British administration fashioned a medical policy whose implementation spanned from 1922 to 1930. Informed by the colonial imperative, administrative and medical officers developed medical infrastructure, trained and engaged personnel, conducted research, and made efforts to roll back the incidence of various diseases. This took curative and preventive forms in a context of conflicting agendas, colonial arrogance, cultural ignorance, and defective infrastructure and personnel. The outcomes were beneficial to the colonial enterprise and detrimental to the economic wellbeing of the local population, the incidental benefits notwithstanding.

The Adolescent Exotic: Reading New Zealand in David Hair’s “Aotearoa series” (2009–2014)

ABSTRACTNew Zealand adolescent fiction faces problems when it enters the global literary market, but not just predictable problems of uncertain comprehension when national borders are crossed. Cultural difference attracts the attention of the international reader, but raises anxieties about commodification of the text and its culture. David Hair’s “Aotearoa series” is anchored in a New Zealand past, largely revising history in line with Māori myths. In this modified fantasy, Aotearoa becomes an imaginary, secondary world to which the protagonist switches to discover something of himself, his Māori heritage, and the colonial enterprise in New Zealand. Hair’s novels display the glamour of their cultural difference, offering an international reader the lure of the foreign – an instance of the postcolonial exotic – which may improve their chances of selling in the overcrowded, global market for adolescent fiction, but perhaps at the cost of damaging, ideological confusion.

Pirates and Publicity: The Making and Unmaking of Early Modern Pirates in English and Scottish Popular Print

This essay contrasts scholarship on printed authority within buccaneer ethnographies, contemporary apologetics for colonial enterprise, and the role of publicity in the delineation of piracy within print to ask: ‘when is a pirate not a pirate?’. Beginning with the ethnographies relating to the buccaneers’ crossing of the Isthmus of Darien during the ‘Pacific Adventure’ (1679–1682), this paper describes how the buccaneers escaped prosecution through their literary materials and became socially rehabilitated as credible explorers. Drawing on materials which highlight the diverse readings of piracy within the different ‘news-cultures’ and maritime traditions which existed in the Atlantic archipelago, this paper develops an argument for a ‘popular’ conception and interpretation of piracy within publicity and periodical print which reflects its utility within competing political and maritime enterprises. Using contrasting examples of the negotiation and renegotiation of what constituted ‘piracy’ within the promotion of the attempted colonisation of the Isthmus of Darien by the Company of Scotland (1696–1700), and the literary campaign which surrounded the trial of the crew of the Worcester for piracy in 1705, this essay argues for the role of ‘public opinion’ and popular print culture in the making and unmaking of pirates in early modern anglophone print.

Representing Home: Reading the Aesthetics of Food in Postcolonial Literature

SummaryThis article seeks to establish aesthetic analysis as an integral approach to post-colonial literature, taking attention to form and depictions of beauty to stand for aesthetic qualities. More specifically, this article reads the treatment of food in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace (2000) and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef (1995) as not only aesthetic achievements that resonate powerfully with many postcolonial concerns, but also as instances where aesthetically sensitive attention to form critically informs postcolonial concerns. Given the rapid development in the inter-sections between food studies and postcolonial criticism, food is no longer merely domestic and therefore apolitical, or in the play of flavours and spices and odours are the threads of colonial enterprises, national histories, independence movements, family legacies and personal narratives entwined around representations of home.

Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn by Clara A.B. Joseph

Reviewed by: Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn by Clara A.B. Joseph Binu Varghese Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn By Clara A.B. Joseph. London: Routledge, 2019. Christianity in India: The anti-colonial turn makes an incredible contribution to the postcolonial historiography of India by focusing on subjugated, rather forgotten, readings of precolonial Indian Christianity. It offersa fresh approach to look further into postcolonial historiography to probe the existence and identity of Christians in precolonial India. The main purpose of the book is to educate and enlighten those who think Christianity is primarily colonial and a relic of European colonialism in India. The author investigates the historical challenge of proving the existence of St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, India. She admits the risk of scant historicity of Thomas' coming to India and evangelizing Brahmin families in Mylapore in AD 57 (p. 17). Since all internal pieces of evidence and sacred books of the community were burned by the Portuguese, external Western resources are summoned. Other modern sources of Indian Christian history call for reconciliation for categorizing Indian Christians as unpatriotic. Joseph argues that such categorizations are associated with the Eurocentric view of Christianity in India as a colonial enterprise (19). Joseph utilizes literary analysis with careful attention to genres and terminologies employed in a postcolonial reading. She exposes the resources to the hermeneutics of suspicion, exposing the pitfalls of a generic procolonial reading of Indian Christianity. Joseph uses Edward Said's secular criticism and critiques postcolonial interpretation of cultural hybridity between Portuguese traders and St. Thomas Christians (18). The trend of looking at foreign origins of a community as non-Christian and listing converts as unpatriotic and anti-nationalist is orientalism as its best, according to Joseph (19). The European imagination of Orientals in India was detrimental, as Joseph poignantly notes (27). The Portuguese employed civilizing techniques on the culture of St. Thomas Christians, deeming it uncivilized. The complex codes and associated meanings of Hinduism didn't appease valorizing colonial minds. Joseph traces these anti-sentiments to five hundred years of cultural imagination of India as a wealthy and hospitable country. These cultural prejudices resulted in a Western view of India as a "Christian nation." The existence of St. Thomas Christians in Kerala, India, was a surprising discovery for the colonialists. Joseph probes into the mysterious search of the Portuguese for Prester John, the legendary Christian king of India. During the early twelfth century, Europeans found the existence of a "Christian India" as a potential economic source and an ally for their crusade endeavors. The search for shared grounds was evident in colonial missions. Joseph identifies the "imperial logic of Christian expansion" (quoting Christopher Taylor) in which external threats of Islam would be repressed, and a global Christian network could rise once and for all. It sounded promising because the self-other dynamics of the colonizer and colonized work simultaneously for a common objective. The author contests the "self at the center" colonial hermeneutics, according to which, Paul Ricoeur writes, prioritizing the colonizing self over the colonial other would actually tend towards "solicitude for one's neighbor and… justice for each individual" (34). The commonness or sharedness was a distant dream for both parties since the ideals of mutuality were perturbed because of India's alleged heretic roots. In Chapter 3 Joseph explores the life-situations of St. Thomas Christians in relation to the cultural transmission with the Portuguese. The overarching narrative is adapted from the travelogues of Vasco Da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral. The main findings of Joseph circle around the literature available in the form of writings in the seventeenth century that were translated in the modern era. Gama and his comrades were highly militaristic and worked tenuously to defeat the Moors (Islamic invaders), which in turn caused fear of and resultant actions against Eastern Christians. The stiff competition in trade from the Muslims, as Joseph says, caused the Portuguese to switch to a colonial mode of invasion (64). In her own words, the fear of the Moor was "how colonial responsibility, whether civic or ecclesiastical, was meted out" (65). And the sheer resemblance of Eastern Christians to the Moors invoked a sense...

From Villain to Messiah: Colonial Discourse and the “Jesus-fication” of King Chaka in Thomas Mofolo's <em>Chaka</em>

This paper reappraises Thomas Mofolo's Chaka as a novel that covertly subverts the biblical and colonial notions of sin, salvation, and backwardness that were part of the colonialist enterprise's ideological corpus in Africa—the so called "civilizing mission"—and very astutely deconstructs, and then reconstructs, the character of Chaka into a messianic figure whose ultimate death (and betrayal) at the hands of his own attracts the kind of sympathy that is reserved only for fallen heroes and, consequently, prophets. While a number of critics have looked at some of the biblical implications of Mofolo's fictionalized rendering of the Zulu cultural and historical universe under king Chaka, it is only somewhat hesitantly that Chaka has been read assertively as an anticolonial and resistance novel that, by attributing to Chaka a trajectory and destiny that closely mirror those of Jesus Christ, has sought to subvert the missionary ethos of the time.

Hope Leslie and the Grounds of Secularism

Hope Leslie and the Grounds of Secularism Ashley Reed (bio) In Catharine Maria Sedgwick's 1827 historical novel, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts, the eponymous Hope, her adoptive father, William Fletcher, and local patriarch Mr. Holioke stand atop a mountain on the outskirts of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and contemplate, in the valley below, "sites for future villages, already marked out for them by clusters of Indian huts."1 The three white settlers imagine a process by which the spirits of dead white Christians have already taken possession of the land despite the fact that living Indian bodies currently inhabit it. But the white settlers do not picture the violent, on-the-ground mechanism by which "future villages" will eventually replace these Indian huts. Instead, Hope imagines the air "filled with invisible intelligences" while Holioke, not normally given to flights of fancy, avers that "the spirits of those who have died for liberty and religion, have come before us to this wilderness, and taken possession in the name of the Lord" (104). Discovering signs of recent Native religious activity, notably a "pyramidal pile of stones" forming a "rude altar" strewn with "relicts of Indian sacrifices," Hope offers to "stand sponsor" for the mountain while the two men "[consecrate] it to the Lord" and "christen it Holioke" (104, 105). [End Page 89] Describing the day's outing later in a letter to Fletcher's son, Everell, Hope regrets that the mountain and the valleys below "have been seen and enjoyed only by those savages, who have their summer homes in them" (104). Until the Puritans arrived, the landscape was a local feature only. Now that the universal spirits of "liberty and religion" have claimed the area, it has become part of the greater imagined realm of Protestant Christendom, and the eventual disappearance of the local inhabitants—and their gods—can be taken for granted. The claims made by the "spirits of … liberty and religion" supersede any made by the Indigenous people already living on the land, or by those peoples' particular deities. Liberty and religion, the settlers assume, are values shared universally by all peoples, while the natives' claim to the land, if they ever had any, is only local and particular. This scene succinctly encapsulates the history of Western secularism as the anthropologist and cultural theorist Talal Asad describes it. Secularism, according to Asad, "replac[es] conflicting perspectives by unifying experience": it is a territorial process by which local customs, traditions, and peoples are subdued, then replaced by ostensibly universal subjects who have transcended such local peculiarities.2 Unlike Charles Taylor's concept of Western secularism, framed in terms of cognitive attachments as "a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others,"3 Asad's model of political secularism acknowledges the violent territorial processes by which Western secularism supplants local peoples and cultures and then erases the memory of those processes through appeals to transcendent goods. In the United States, those violent territorial processes have proceeded by way of settler colonialism, that "distinctive, and particularly invidious, species of colonialism" that is "very often fueled by religious narratives [End Page 90] such as those of chosen people, exile, holy land, cities on hills."4 First disambiguated by the anthropologist Patrick Wolfe,5 settler colonialism is structurally distinct from the more common form of colonial enterprise, sometimes called "extractive colonialism" or "franchise colonialism," in which "an exogenous power establishes its authority over a subordinated population to extract wealth and resources from the colonized territory." While "occupation colonies" or "exploitation colonies" (as they are also sometimes called) rely on Native labor to facilitate wealth extraction, settler colonies "see[k] an end or completion of the colonial project via the elimination of the indigenous population and its replacement by a settler population."6 Settlers, then, as Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson have asserted, are better called "settler-invaders," since settler colonialism's end goal is not to extract wealth for transfer to the metropole but to eliminate native inhabitants and to "[expropriate] … indigenous land."7 This essay brings together scholarship on North American...

Racializing Chōsenjin: Science and Biological Speculations in Colonial Korea

Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars, however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as “racial sciences”—physical anthropology, serological anthropology, and human genetics—with regard to the biological characteristics of Koreans. In doing so, it argues that biological speculations on Koreans originated as a subdiscipline of Japanese origin studies and resonated with a newly emerging type of colonial racism in colonial Korea—inclusionary racism. The article also presents the colonial scientific enterprise’s conclusion that Koreans were biologically heterogeneous, contradicting colonial Korean intellectuals’ assertion about Korean ethnic homogeneity. The use of Korean ethnic homogeneity as an ideological basis for nation building by two Korean governments meant that postcolonial Korean scientists had to seek a way to reconcile the colonial era’s “scientific conclusion” (biological heterogeneity) with the postcolonial era’s “politically approved” conceptualization (biological homogeneity). Therefore, regardless of whether it was trying to refute, appropriate, or revitalize the colonial legacy, biological research on Koreans in the postcolonial period was carried out under the framework that had been constructed by colonial racial sciences.

John M. Monteiro. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America.

John M. Monteiro. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America.

Bicentenaries and belonging: Public heritage of the lower Blue Mountains and the politics of place attachment

ABSTRACTThis photo essay explores some of the meanings of belonging, place attachment, community and heritage within my local community of the lower Blue Mountains, on the urban fringe to the west of Sydney, Australia. I argue that there is a prevailing version of heritage in this locality that constructs belonging in certain ways, excluding and marginalizing some on the basis of ‘social locations’ such as gender and race (Yuval-Davis 2006, 199). I identify this as a local manifestation of what is known as the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) (Smith 2006), through which hegemonic concepts prevalent at state and national levels such as commemorations of white colonization, play out at the local level. I explore how this dominant discourse creates an ambiguity and dissonance in my attachment to place, further problematized by my status as a white Australian, making me a reluctant beneficiary of the colonial enterprise.

Évariste Parny, Selected Poetry and Prose of Évariste Parny: In English Translation, with French Text. Edited by Françoise Lionnet. Translated by Peter Low and Blake Smith

This book resurrects the work of a long-forgotten and little-read eighteenth-century white Créole poet. It presents, both in the original French and in English translation, an anthology of Évariste Parny’s published work, including verse and prose poetry, letters, and a narrative poem. A comprehensive and very readable Introduction by Françoise Lionnet covers: Parny’s life and passions in the Indian Ocean; gender, race, and sexuality in his poems; and his career and postcolonial legacies. Parny’s experiences in love are discussed, as are the ways in which ‘his truthful depiction […] contributed to the authenticity’ of his Poésies érotiques (p. xvii). Lionnet gives a socio-political history of the Indian Ocean islands, which played a strategic role for the French colonial enterprise as well as providing inspiration for Parny’s work. The Introduction provides a brief background understanding of trade routes, slavery, racial stereotyping, and creolization, which helps the modern reader to appreciate overt and subtle arguments made within Parny’s Chansons madécasses as he demonstrates his ‘rebellion against the imperial process’ (p. xxxiv). The Introduction also proves interesting from the point of view of gender studies, with consideration made of how Parny bucked contemporary trends regarding the eroticization of foreign female bodies and communicated empathy and clarity ‘as he engages ironically with received ideas and erroneous European representations’ of gender and the objectification of women (p. xxiv). The editor clearly situates Parny as ‘open[ing] the way for twentieth- and twenty-first-century trends’ (p. xxxiii). In this vein, Lionnet also notes that Parny’s Chansons (which were set to music by Ravel in 1925) can now be found in various recordings on YouTube. In addition Lionnet offers, through close reading, brief interpretation of specific lines of Parny’s work. Discussion of how Parny breaks with established poetic practices and constraints of traditional form accompanies analysis of the poet’s satire and use of language and rhyme to highlight elements within his writing. This analysis informs the English translation of the works themselves. Although poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, the emphasis Parny attributes to certain words, lines, and images is often maintained here through compensation or substitution techniques (such as recreating rhyme or word placement, or by replacing rhyme with alliteration). Particularly interesting from the point of view of translation studies are Lionnet’s remarks that possible double meanings in Parny’s lines have been noted by a modern Reunionese readership, and that the Reunionese Creole translations of the Chansons ‘accentuate the ironic tone and the implicit contradictions of Parny’s descriptive vocabulary’ (p. xxvii). These interpretations have clearly been taken into consideration when translating the poems into English for this volume. Ultimately, the book underlines Parny’s significant role in francophone literary history; however, it is also a useful addition to the bookshelves of students of history, postcolonialism, gender studies, world literature, musicology, and even translation studies.