Whose America? Decolonial Translation by Frederick Douglass and Caetano Veloso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Colonial domination entails a struggle over interpretation. The colonizers establish whose version of reality will be codified and become the dominant one. Breaking with that dominant, authorized account implies a struggle against hegemony. Translators have always played key roles in colonization as agents of the colonizer. Subaltern translators and interpreters have often served in this role. But they often contest dominant meanings. They subvert dominant meanings as they transform them across the colonial divide. Theorizing translation practices from that point of colonial conjunction or contact, this essay adduces two examples to see how a decolonial methodology to study translation and power can shed light on how, in the hands of an astute translator, a translation can offer a counter-narrative that deconstructs colonial systems of meaning. The two examples: Frederick Douglass’ intralingual translation of the meaning of the Fourth of July (1852) and singer Caetano Veloso’s recording of Augusto de Campos’ translation (1979) of John Donne’s “Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going To Bed” (1654). Three interconnected characteristics make the translations decolonial. (1) They are abusive (Lewis, 2000; Venuti, 2013). (2) The target language or culture is an imagined world, better and more just than the world we live in now (Santos, 2014). (3) They are performatives insofar as they begin to bring that imagined world into existence through performing the translation (Austin, 1975). As a deconstructive embrace, this kind of translation draws attention to the colonial legacy and to the colonial context, and also to itself—that is, to its own selective appropriation (Spivak, 1995, p. 31).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".