Women in translation: Politics of cultural translation in three women's texts in diaspora.

摘要

This project concerns the politics of cultural translation in three texts by female writers at the diverse sites of the world of postcoloniality---Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Buchi Emecheta's The Family , Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. On the level of narrative actions all three of the writers seek to portray multiply inscribed gendered subjects in search of proper identity/location/home. While their searches might be sustained by identifying mirroring, faithful transmission of cultural components, strategies of hybridization or cultural synthesis, the novels provide textual ruptures that disrupt the seams of such coherent narrative economy. These textual ruptures disclose the conditions of non-identification and untranslatability as the ontological as well as epistemological ground that shapes the female character's specific "dialectics of experience" in diaspora. The concept of cultural translation is thus contingent upon textual and subject untranslatability to point to subject constructs formed in the interstices of languages and cultural ideologies in which they are always already implicated.;Chapter I maps out a few types of translation in postcoloniality and strives for a definition of "cultural translation" through the investigation of Benjamin's and Spviak's theories of translation.;Chapter II examines Jean Rhys's multiple translation from realism to modernism to that hybridized form of female Caribbean narrative that stages the failure of translation in the protagonist's search for subjective propriety.;Chapter III investigates Buchi Emechta's politics of translation between illiteracy and literacy. I problematize two kinds of translation strategies practiced by Cynthia Ward and Emecheta to strive for a third reading.;Chapter IV explores Maxine Hong Kingston's dilemma between the convention of "ethnic autobiography" and postmodern mode of ethnicity to suggest that the demand for a coherent narrative of ethnicity is both the coercive cultural hegemony and the ground from which a different kind of "ethnic" subject arises.