Books in Translation: Three tales touching on French colonialism
The idea of anticolonial translation — picking works, and approaches to those works, that resist or examine the effects of empire — has gained increasing sway among English-language translators and editors. It's a huge boon for English-speaking readers.
Consider three books — none of which come from the same continent and all of which not only were written in French but also deal, glancingly or in depth, with French colonialism. Mutt-Lon's , set in Cameroon, satirizes the racism and white saviorism of France's last wave of colonizers; , by the Tahitian novelist Titaua Peu, is set in French Polynesia and portrays theis a poetic monologue tracing one woman's journey from Vietnam to Soviet Russia to France. Read together, these three novels, totally divergent in their styles and attitudes, are a powerful testament to anti-colonial translation, and a demonstration of the great range of literature that such an attitude can bring to our shelves.
