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Part of
Translation Flows: Exploring networks of people, processes and products
Edited by Ilse Feinauer, Amanda Marais and Marius Swart
[Benjamins Translation Library 163] 2023
► pp. 207–223

Chapter 11
The tidalectics of translation

On the necessity of rethinking translation flows from the Caribbean

| University College Dublin

This chapter aims to contribute to debates on non-market-centric, more equitable, sustainable routes of transnational literary circulation, particularly for those literatures originally produced, translated, disseminated and distributed in fragilized ecosystems. To this end, it proposes an epistemological move away from traditional core-periphery, Global North-Global South paradigms. Rather than adopting a market-oriented approach, it aims to rethink Translation Studies from the perspective of the complex, varied and fragile ecosystems of the Caribbean. In relation to flows from and beyond the Caribbean, it will concentrate on Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘tidalectics’ (or ‘tidal dialectic[s]’) to envisage more sustainable flows of transnational literary circulation and rethink acts and processes of translation within their ‘natural’, vulnerable contexts of emergence (Brathwaite, 1983).

Keywords: tidalectics, translation flows, circle culture, solidarity, Caribbean literary ecosystem, circular economy, Kamau Brathwaite, South-South connections, episteme-shifting
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Methodology and material
  • On the origins and subsequent readings of “tidalectics”
  • “Circle culture” and “alter/native” flows of literary circulation
  • Episteme-shifting: On the submarine flows of translation
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.163.11sai
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