Translating Slavery: Ourika and its progeny

Book excerpt: This is a new, revised, and expanded edition of a translation studies classic. Translating Slavery explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender, and race by focusing on antislavery writing by or about French women in the French revolutionary period. Now in a two-volume collection, Translating Slavery closely examines what happens when translators translate and when writers treat issues of gender and race. The volumes explore the theoretical, linguistic, and literary complexities involved when white writers, especially women, took up their pens to denounce the injustices to which blacks were subjected under slavery. Volume 1, Gender and Race in French Abolitionist Writing, 1780-1830, highlights key issues in the theory and practice of translation by providing essays on the factors involved in translating gender and race, as well as works in translation. A section on abolitionist narrative, poetry, and theater has been added with a number of new translations, excerpts, and essays, in addition to an interview with the new member of the translating team, Norman R. Shapiro. Volume 2, Ourika and Its Progeny, will contain the original translation and analyses of Claire de Duras' Ourika by Massardier-Kenney and Salardenne and new essays and translations.