Language and Slavery (2025)

Review: Stephen Epstein's Speaking of Slavery, Journal of Early Modern History 13 (2009) 71-98

2009

Translating Slavery, Volume 2: Ourika and Its Progeny

2009

Manufactured in the united States of america "Staging Ourika and the Spectacle of difference" first appeared in Ethnography in French Literature, edited by Buford norman. FLS v23 (1996). amsterdam and atlanta: editions rodopi. reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Translating slavery / edited by doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney.-[rev. and expanded ed.] p. cm.-(Translation studies ; 5) Vol. 1. Gender and race in French abolitionist writing, 1780-1830-Vol. 2. ourika and its progeny. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Portrayal of slave trade and some linguistic features

Koumagnon Alfred Djossou, 2019

Centuries ago, Africa witnessed one of the most shocking traffic in human beings ever to happen in the world. The traffic stripped millions of young, brave and strong African people from their land for free labour beyond the horizon. The traffic set commercial opportunities for the perpetrators providing them with wealth and fame. The last decades have seen a rise in literature triggered by the need for a devoir de memoir for future generations. This event has transformed the various literary genres that are conducted by African writers to induce the changing of mind in the descendants-victims and the perpetrators. This is manifested in an approach of revealing the historical event by using contemporary fictional devices. The novel under scrutiny, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995) narrates in a special way the Transatlantic Slave Trade that has been the concern of a whole country in terms of trauma embodied in characters in post-colonial female writing. The paper seeks to analyse the interest of contemporary African female writers to map in the ghosts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade which has provoked the prevailing poverty in Africa for centuries. The focus of this paper is to examine how Amma Darko uses fiction to map that shameful and horrible trade named triangular slave trade or Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Early Slavery in Bantu and Nilotic-Speaking Africa: The Evidence from Historical Linguistics

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, 2022

The history of slavery runs deep in Africa, yet historians have rarely explored the early contexts in which Africans resorted to slaving. The burdens of remembering and reckoning with the global trades in African slaves have no doubt shaped this state of affairs, but examining the early history of slaveries in the continent is critical for understanding central themes of the African past, such as political formation, ethnicity, and economic development. While archaeology often appears silent on this topic, the method of historical linguistics can reveal how northeastern and central Africans resorted to slaving strategies as they settled new places, developed new ways of life, established polities, and faced climate change. Historical research thus shows that "slavery" was never a static institution in the continent, but a fraught category Africans constructed in diverse, albeit related, ways. Accounting for the ways in which Africans built such categories in particular contexts remains a major challenge facing historians of Africa's earlier past.

Yesterday and today: studying African slavery, the slave trade and their legacies through oral sources

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, 2000

Research on African slavery covers a variety of situations and contexts that show both parallels and divergences due to local historical trajectories. In relation to the role of slavery, the slave trade and its abolition in the historical experience of African individuals and communities, oral sources can provide insight into the lives of African slaves, slavers and their contemporary descendants. These materials were important in the 1960s and early 1970s, when research on African slavery started, and they remain so today thanks to the growing activism of slave 1 This chapter was completed thanks to funding from the European Research Council in the framework of the ERC project 313737-Shadows of Slavery in West Africa and Beyond: A Historical Anthropology. I also thank the EURIAS program, the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin and the Gilder Lerhman Centes for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition of the University of Yale. Research in the Senegambia was carried out under the auspices of MEBAO Missione Etnologica in Bénin e Africa Occidentale , a project financed from 2000 by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Book Review: Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power

Journal of English Linguistics, 2012

and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

The Struggle for Language Rights: Naming and Interrogating the Colonial Legacy of "English Only

2006

Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery

The American Historical Review, 1997

Diasporic dialogues: The role of gender, language, and revision in the neo-slave narrative

In this article I examine the creation of neo-slave narratives, or fictional texts written in the 20 th and 21 st centuries, yet set during an imagined period of American slavery or indentured servitude. In these novels the authors, usually African-descended, depict slavery and/or plantation life, generally, to privilege the experiences of the slave. The process of actively writing against traditional plantation narratives of the 18 th and 19 th centuries can liberate slave histories and allows silenced actors to speak. However, in this paper, I argue that there is a danger of further marginalization when History is the platform for creative expression. I examine two novels whose authors employ the use of satire to discuss slave experience and by doing so, I explore how the images of Black slave and servant women can be either devalued or empowered depending on authorial representation and intent.

Review: Le Sable de Babel: Traduction et apartheid (Alain Ricard)

The central argument in Alain Ricard’s Le Sable de Babel. Traduction et apartheid explores the complex relationship between translation as a practice that builds bridges and makes connections and apartheid as a set of concepts, laws and institutions that sought to implement racial separateness. Ricard emphasizes the ethics at work in dialogic translation; a practice that involves the creation of meaning and intercultural dialogue. Following the myth of Babel in the Bible according to which people were dispersed into different language groups, Ricard takes up Paul Ricoeur’s invitation to embrace translation as a means of overcoming these linguistic divisions with an ethics of hospitality across languages (Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 2004). Of course, any openness to transcend the boundaries of language and ethnicity through translation was banished under apartheid with the adoption of racist laws, the segregation of space and the virtual exclusion of translation from Bantu education programs. Through the separation of people by race came connections between territory (inhabited by whites, blacks, coloreds, Indians), language (Afrikans, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.) and political rights in South Africa. Whereas many may have seen the form of despotism that was set up in South Africa under apartheid as somehow unique to that regime (1948-1994), Mahmood Mamdani has argued that the “decentralized despotism” under apartheid can and should be seen as exemplary of colonial relations of domination everywhere on the continent (Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 1997). Ricard builds on Mamdani’s observations and argues that African literature as a basic expression of freedom came up against a concept of human relations defined by the domination of one group by another across the continent.