Translation and resistance to transparent forms of knowledge: The case of Caribbean literatures

This dissertation brings to light the hidden potentialities of Martinican philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant's concept of opacity for fostering community-building in the form of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchanges. In this study, I examine the linguistic and formal strategies of resistance that writers and translators of Caribbean literature employ to communicate the silenced histories and erased experiences of the archipelagoes and their respective diasporas in Europe and the United States. A challenge to the seemingly insular image of the Caribbean island, this comparative project underscores the importance of cross-cultural conversations in both the humanities and our ever increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world, in its examination of the following eight writers and their works: Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupe), Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rico), Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/U.S.), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/U.S.), Sam Selvon (Trinidad/England), and Gisele Pineau (Guadeloupe/France). Working from the framework of Translation and Memory Studies, I highlight the productive tension embedded in the notion of 'opacity' as both a form of linguistic and cultural dissent and a bridge between cultures. In light of both fields resistance to transparent or fixed understandings of a text and the past, respectively, this project argues that the fissured lens through which acts of translating and remembering eventually take place, has the capacity to open up new lines of communication. The underlying concern of this dissertation project---that formal aspects of language play a vital role in how effectively we communicate or translate our ideas and thoughts across cultural spaces and disciplines---equally cuts across aesthetic and political discourses. This reading of opacity allows us to take a fresh look at the question of language in the specific case of the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean islands, as well as the possibilities for its important implications for other creolized and diasporic communities.