This study explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender and race. It focuses on anti-slavery writing by French women during the revolutionary period, when a number of them spoke out against the oppression of slaves and women."

A new, revised, and expanded edition of a translation studies classic Translating Slavery explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender, and race by focusing on antislavery writing by or about French women in the French revolutionary period. Now in a two-volume collection, Translating Slavery closely examines what happens when translators translate and when writers treat issues of gender and race. The volumes explore the theoretical, linguistic, and literary complexities involved when white writers, especially women, took up their pens to denounce the injustices to which blacks were subjected under slavery. Volume 1, Gender and Race in French Abolitionist Writing, 1780-1830, highlights key issues in the theory and practice of translation by providing essays on the factors involved in translating gender and race, as well as works in translation. A section on abolitionist narrative, poetry, and theater has been added with a number of new translations, excerpts, and essays, in addition to an interview with the new member of the translating team, Norman R. Shapiro. This revised and expanded edition of Translating Slavery will appeal to readers and students interested in women's studies, African American studies, French literature and history, comparative literature, and translation studies.

This is a new, revised, and expanded edition of a translation studies classic. Translating Slavery explores the complex interrelationships that exist between translation, gender, and race by focusing on antislavery writing by or about French women in the French revolutionary period. Now in a two-volume collection, Translating Slavery closely examines what happens when translators translate and when writers treat issues of gender and race. The volumes explore the theoretical, linguistic, and literary complexities involved when white writers, especially women, took up their pens to denounce the injustices to which blacks were subjected under slavery. Volume 1, Gender and Race in French Abolitionist Writing, 1780-1830, highlights key issues in the theory and practice of translation by providing essays on the factors involved in translating gender and race, as well as works in translation. A section on abolitionist narrative, poetry, and theater has been added with a number of new translations, excerpts, and essays, in addition to an interview with the new member of the translating team, Norman R. Shapiro. Volume 2, Ourika and Its Progeny, will contain the original translation and analyses of Claire de Duras' Ourika by Massardier-Kenney and Salardenne and new essays and translations.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Jacob Gorender's (1923–2013) 1978 book, Colonial Slavery (O Escravismo Colonial), comes alive for English language readers thanks to Bernd Reiter and Alejandro Reyes's brilliant translation. Gorender argued that slave-holding societies produced an economic system sui generis, not fitting into any of the established societal categories offered by Karl Marx and Max Weber. As such, Gorender proposed a theory of colonial slavery as the structuring force of slave-holding societies. For him, slave-holding societies are different from other societies in that slavery structured them differently. This is of the utmost relevance to this day as it allows for a new and different way to explain contemporary racial inequalities in post-slavery societies. An accomplished interpreter of Brazilian social formation, Gorender was motivated by the need to understand the historical roots of class domination and the emergence of Brazilian capitalist society. His presentation of rich historical data, rigorous theoretical and analytical framework, and militant action as an active member of the Brazilian Communist Party are the hallmarks of his writing. Colonial Slavery: An Abridged Translation is a must-read for researchers, teachers, and students of history, sociology, economics, politics, as well as activists of the Black movement and other movements committed to anti-racism.

John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers. Based on a true story, Claire de Duras's Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race--and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe. A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind."