Translating the Anticolonial Novel: Anglophone Caribbean Writers at Cuba’s Casa de las Américas

Dr. Emily Taylor presents three foundational Caribbean novels published in the 1950s from pre-Independence Barbados, Jamaica and Guyana, translated by Casa in the 1970s. George Lamming’s 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Roger Mais’s The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), and Jan Carew’s Black Midas (1958) all represent characters struggling under English colonial systems, and articulate anti-colonial discourses that echo the official Cuban rhetoric of the 1970s, when the Fondo Editorial publishes the Casa translations of these novels. Dr. Taylor tell the story of these writers’ involvement and admiration of Casa and Cuba, and detail how the novels in Spanish translation brought Anglophone Caribbean literature to Cuban and Hispanophone audiences at this key moment.

Sponsored by the English Department, the World Languages and Cultures Department, and the Office of Inclusive Excellence