Feminist Translation Matters: Reading Fashion, Materiality, and Revolution in the English-Language Translations of Marie Chauvet’s La danse sur le volcan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut.v13n1a08Keywords:
fashion, Chauvet, material culture, Haitian Revolution, feminist translation, African diaspora studiesAbstract
Like feminist translation studies, recent scholarship at the intersections of feminist and fashion theories has offered new ways of thinking about the history of modernity, the body, and communication in interpersonal and transnational spheres. Fashion and translation share similar attributes in popular thought—both are ubiquitous and often perceived as superficial. Both are often relegated to the realm of the feminine in which the labor of self-fashioning or translation is viewed as derivative, shallow, or intellectually disengaged. Drawing together feminist knowledge from translation and fashion studies to form a transdisciplinary framework, this paper explores the role of dress—its production, materiality, and history—in the context of two English-language translations of the novel La danse sur le volcan (1957) by Haitian author Marie Chauvet (1916-1973). In its analysis of the translation history of La danse into English, this article suggests that a transnational feminist literary translation praxis necessitates a sustained engagement with the material and imagined lives of objects in the longue durée, particularly fashion items such as scarves and dresses.
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