Translating Toward a Dark Commons: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

abstract:Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved plays with different shades of meaning available in the word, “dark,” subverting its conventional definitions in the process. This is a common strategy in Morrison’s writing, who has stated that freeing up the English language from racially determined chains of meaning is one of her goals. By analyzing the Urdu translation of Beloved, specifically, by looking at the translation of the word, “dark,” I examine if the translation also recodes language or if it reinforces racist representations that have informed South Asian literatures in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. At the heart of this comparative analysis is a larger question: Can literary translation create meaningful aesthetic and political relations between different southscapes, between the U.S. South and the Global South? While Morrison’s book presents a profound and complex engagement with histories of slavery in the U.S. South, the Urdu translation of Beloved places the book in a long tradition of Global South translational practices and reciprocities. Paying attention to tropes of darkness in both texts, I argue that the two southscapes engage dynamically as the translation fails to create new aesthetic and political possibilities in certain respects but succeeds in other instances.