Translation, Decolonial Futures, and More-than-Human: Caribbean Utopia in Lahens’ Bain de Lune
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.24.1.2025.4142Keywords:
decoloniality, ecotranslation, Caribbean futurisms, Franco-Creole literature, feminist translation, ecocriticism, utopia, more-than-humanAbstract
This article highlights critical utopian proposals in a decolonial framework that have emerged in Abya Yala and the Caribbean, reclaiming counter-hegemonic temporalities and proposing, with an eye to the past, present and future paths of degrowth and epistemic and ecological relationality. From this fertile ground, this paper focuses on Franco-Creole women's narratives and delves into their eco-ethical and epistemic alternatives to colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, and extractivist systems that threaten bodies, territories, languages, and ancestral knowledges. Specifically, through a translatological analysis of Haitian Yanick Lahens' Bain de Lune, translation is proposed as a key tool for amplifying these voices from the tropics and promoting a more horizontal, posthuman, and situated dialogue that acknowledges the intersecting oppressions affecting Caribbean lands, humans, and more-than-humans. Translation acts as a decolonial de/re-territorialization mechanism, enabling the circulation of knowledge once transmitted orally and now preserved in Caribbean women's writing. Indeed, these agro-ecological, medicinal, and supernatural knowledges rearticulate the connection to the dispossessed territories and propose other non-anthropocentric and non-teleological ways of imagining the world as a valuable guide for envisioning futures that break the dominant ecocidal and epistemicidal cycle.
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