Race and Responsibility in Translation

Join Kaiama Glover and Barbara Ofosu-Somuah as they discuss how translation functions as a mode of racialised narrative and therefore demands an ethics of care that implicates the writer, the translator, the publisher, and even the audience.

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has written extensively about Caribbean literature in such works as A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone non-fiction. Her current projects include an intellectual biography titled “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life" and a translation of Yanhick Lahens's Douces déroutes. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean.

Barbara Ofosu-Somuah

Barbara Ofosu-Somuah is an educational equity researcher, writer, and emerging Italian-to-English translator, from Accra, Ghana, and the Bronx, New York. As a translator, she attempts to bring the works of contemporary Afro-Italian writers to English-speaking audiences. She has received both Thomas J. Watson and Fulbright research fellowships to investigate the racialized lived experiences of Black people, primarily womxn, across the African diaspora. During her Fulbright year, collaborated with various Black Italian organisations/collectives as they unpacked the reality of concurrently embodying Blackness and Italianness in a culture that perceives both identities as incompatible. Ofosu-Somuah has a Bachelor of Arts in sociology, psychology, and Italian, from Middlebury College.