Susanne Mühleisen

Postcolonial Translation: Encounters across Languages, Cultures, and Disciplines

Abstract Ever since its emergence in the 1990s, postcolonial translation theory has become a household name in literary and Cultural Studies, with influential works by Tejaswini Niranjana (1992), Douglas Robinson (1997) and topical edited collections by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (1999), Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (2002), and Raoul J. Granqvist (2006). In postcolonial translation discourse, “translation” is used as a rather broad category that includes interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic meaning transfer as well as metonymic uses of the term. Sometimes neglected in these debates, however, are some very concrete and tangible linguistic issues concerned in postcolonial translation, and especially in two fields of linguistic inquiry. They can be divided into (1) sociolinguistic and language political considerations and (2) socio-cultural and pragmatic considerations. These concerns will be exemplified in a detailed analysis of two 1960s Shakespeare translations into the Sierra Leonean Creole language Krio, Juliohs Siza (see Decker 1965/1988) and Udat di Kiap Fit (see Decker 1966/forthcoming)

Editorial: Telling Stories about Self in Digital Contexts: Same, Same, but Different?

On 2 August 2016, one discussion topic caused a stir among social media users: a popular smartphone app Instagram introduced a new feature named ‘Stories’. A ‘story’ involves a series of pictures and videos taken by a user throughout the day automatically collated into a slideshow. Many have criticised Instagram for closely modelling their ‘stories’ on the Snapchat’s analogous feature, which in 2013 had been the key marketing point for the app and made the company successful. The most important aspect of both Snapchat and Instagram stories is that they are ephemeral: they can only be viewed for 24 hours after posting-time after which they fade into nothingness. Transience, it seems, is one of the most notable qualities of Web 2.0 storytelling in both visual and verbal formats. The microblogging service Twitter, for example, also foregrounds the most recent posts and lets the older ones scroll down into oblivion in a rapidly updating timeline. Transience, non-linearity and other hallmarks of online communication have given rise to a body of scholarly work on how the internet is changing our linguistic practices. The present collection on Personal Narrative Online is situated within the growing presence of explorations of conditions of – and interactions with – narrativity in internet formats. The most recent in this line is Allington & Pihlaja’s (2016) special issue devoted to reading and interpretation in the age of the internet. Two predecessors, Hoffmann (2010) and Page & Thomas (2011), have even closer ties to the present collection: both deal with the narratives in an environment saturated with the social media, blogs, augmented reality and other new affordances. Often, research on ‘new narratives’ picks out rather liminal cases: Page & Thomas (2011), for example, include among their datasets hypertext fiction (Bell 2011) and the interactive novel Breathing Wall (Ensslin 2011). Stenglin & Djonov (2010) in Hoffmann (2010) look at hypermedia ‘artedventure’. Similarly, Ryan (2004) takes on other non-traditional narrative media: genre paintings, reality TV, horror films, and music. In a word, ‘new narratives’ that attract attention are the ones strikingly different from the verbal prototype. Born-digital hypertext, tumblr blogs, vlogs make use of the new sensory and semiotic channels made available by the multimodal internet spaces1. Crucially, storytelling of this type questions the very basics of what constitutes a narrative: a fixed sequence of elements or “a sense of an ending” (Page & Thomas 2011:9). The reader can no longer peek in at the end of the book to learn how the story ends; indeed, the teller herself might not know the ending or even be unaware that she is telling a story (Dayter 2016:180-181). The recognition of the open-ended nature of online narratives has ushered in new theoretical frameworks that can accommodate it; most importantly, the small stories approach (Georgakopoulou 2007).

“More About Me” – Self-Presentation and Narrative Strategies in Caribbean Online Dating Ads

Abstract This paper focuses on self-presentation in dating ads and the strategies advertisers employ to construct their persona to attract and initiate responses from the desired other. Dating ads have experienced considerable structural changes in their transition from print media to online forms. The use of diverse media and interaction forms as well as extended space has resulted in a diversification of possibilities in online partner search in which advertisers use fragmented stories, past and anticipated narratives in order to construct a basic personal narrative. It is argued here that the act of posting the dating ads also functions as part of the advertisers’ life story with the projected end of finding romance or fulfilling other relational goals. The analysis of examples from a corpus of Caribbean dating ads also shows how advertisers make use of particular cultural references, lexical items and spelling adaptations in their creation of an authentic Caribbean persona and as a means to establish common ground with a potential partner.

“Selling the Caribbean: An Introduction”

Abstract Taking the cue from the widespread metaphorical use of economic concepts such as resources or markets in both sociolinguistics and cultural studies, the present introduction sets out to discuss more literal aspects of the financial value of languages and the economy of the literary marketplace in the – mostly ‘Anglophone’ – Caribbean. Globalization, in particular a globally operating media and entertainment industry, and increased mobility – both in the shape of migration from the Caribbean and tourism into the region – have led to the widespread commodification of the region’s natural, linguistic, and cultural resources. These developments have shaken up the traditional colonial and early post-colonial order but ushered in new inequalities. This introduction and the present special issue of ZAA explore the potential and dangers of this state of affairs from a cross-disciplinary perspective, bringing together approaches from (socio)linguistics, literary, and cultural studies.