Contenu du sommaire : Dire et traduire l'identité noire en France et aux États-Unis : questions raciales, enjeux linguistiques, perspectives scientifiques

This article examines the politics of self-nomination through which African Americans have sought to define themselves throughout their history in British North America and the United States. From the slavery era to the present day, this long-term study analyzes the political strategies and ethical issues of self-nomination for a subordinate group subject to the naming power held by the white majority group.

This analysis of French blackness and of the “thin” or “thick” identities that are articulated in it implies incorporating the history and political work that may have contributed to producing a social image of Blacks in the context of postcolonial France. Far from constituting a simple import of the history of the United States, the article shows how it is possible to envisage the contours taken by a French-style blackness by comparing France and the United States and by developing an analysis based on the French Caribbean territories marked by circulations in the whole of the Black Atlantic.

This paper addresses the N-word and its translations. The first problem is how to interpret the connotations of this sign, which are highly variable both on the diachronic level and the synchronic level. A study based on the French translation of the novel A Time to Kill (1989), by John Grisham, will show that there are various solutions and that the choices made by the translator depend on several different factors.

This article studies how the references to the color black in the first series of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were translated into French. They are generally erased in the dubbed French version when made in passing, but they are kept, or even amplified, when the plot deals with color. The authors of this article use approaches from the fields of translation studies and cultural studies (for example, by contrasting a “post-racial” America and France, where SOS Racisme had just been created).

Through a comparison between the two translations of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Françoise Brodsky's Une femme noire (Le Castor astral, 1993) and Sika Fakambi's Mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu (Zulma, 2018), this article aims at assessing how each translator renders the black vernacular of the novel, as well as the opposition between Standard English and the “dialect” which turns the narration into a double-voiced text. An anthropologist and a folklorist, Hurston transposes in her novel the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) which she analyses as a linguist in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934). If, according to Brodsky, the translator must “invent” a language, Fakambi mixes several varieties of languages, keeping at times the original language, to render the text's aurality/orality, so as to “estrange the French language.”

Strange Interlude is a marathon play fusing together dialogue and thoughts spoken out loud in a unique, innovative dramatic object. This essay explores O'Neill's ambition to represent the wholeness and fluidity of psychology, in order to investigate the ways in which this can be embodied on stage in various production styles, from the play's initial triumph to its relative abandonment, and then to a fresh wave of interest in the 21st century, reclaiming the play as experimental ground.