The city that shouldn't be: New Orleans

Abstract

New Orleans is a colonial city that has had to justify its existence since its foundation in 1718 and to project itself into performance, to rely on the exterior value of its own spectacle in order to survive. Scholarship has traditionally emphasized its segregated organization because native tribes were maintained firmly outside its walls, administrative and business quarters were built in a tightly knit square and “free people of colour” formed a distinct class, but this paper explores a different reality and argues that the confined space occupied by the city meant that traffic, negotiations and exchanges of all kinds took place between the denizens of its various neighbourhoods. The focus is on the inextricable ties binding people to the cityscape by mapping out linguistic polyphony, cultural diversity and the complex networks of representations animating the city and conferring upon it a fascinating array of signs.

Keywords:

• New Orleans
• translation history
• cultural translation
• racial segregation
• performance
• cultural survival

Note on contributor

Anne Malena is professor of French and translation studies in the department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She has published The Negotiated Self: The Dynamics of Identity in Francophone Caribbean Narrative (1998); French translations of two novels by Kristjana Gunnars (La Maraude, 1995, which was nominated for the Governor General Literary Award in Translation, and Degré Zéro, 1998); many chapters and articles in top journals specializing in Caribbean studies, translation studies and cultural studies, as well as translated short stories, essays and poetry. She is the editor of TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies. Her current book project involves documenting the history of translation in Louisiana.

Notes

1. Other than the opening scene at the slave market, the action of this text takes place on a plantation outside New Orleans. The text is nonetheless included here because its author lived and worked in the city and offers a very interesting point of view on the languages of French and Creole used in the book (more of a récit social than a novel), that goes a long way in illustrating what is meant by translational interaction.

2. It is only recently that I have started to examine closely anglophone translational texts such as George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes, which would deserve a study of its own from a translational perspective; it cannot be ignored here but will not be analysed at length, serving instead as a reference to explain some aspects of the historic sociolinguistic landscape of New Orleans.

3. Scott explains: “By definition, the hidden transcript represents discourse – gesture, speech, practices – that is ordinarily excluded from the public transcript of subordinates by the exercise of power” (1990, 27).

4. This is an allusion to a title by Hambly (2000).

5. For an analysis of this translation and its ideology, see Malena (2002).

6. See Derrida (1985) for further details on this interpretation.

7. I borrow this subtitle from Rosenwald (2008).

8. “To not only consent to the right to difference but, earlier, to the right to opacity, which is not shutting oneself within an impenetrable autarchy but subsisting within a non reducible singularity” (my translation).

9. “The colonial is exotic but exoticism powerfully surpasses the colonial” (my translation).

10. Priests of the Haitian religion of vaudun.