Translating Revolutionary Politics in the Atlantic World, 1776-1853

Abstract

This dissertation studies the role of translation in the emergence of political concepts as they traveled through the Atlantic world in various discourses, documents, and genres of writing. A practice vital to new revolutionary governments, exiled or internal dissidents, and international abolitionists alike, the translation of political writing supported movements and expanded their scope by, I argue, not merely circulating, but actively transforming the meaning of such concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” “emancipation,” “public feeling,” “the people,” and “abolition.” Our study of this phenomenon has been limited—even stifled altogether—by the still prevailing tendency, academically and colloquially, to misconstrue translation as transparent communication, as the transfer of meaning unchanged from one language to another. Against this tendency, my study proceeds from the understanding that translation is an interpretive act that necessarily varies the meaning, form, and effects of whatever materials are translated. I examine cases of translation that generatively intervened in two decisive moments for the transnational production of the ideas that would become foundational for so-called Western modernity: the Age of Revolutions and the abolitionist period. I offer close readings of the translation of state papers, political theory, and literature by African American educator Prince Saunders, Venezuelan diplomat Manuel García de Sena, Irish abolitionist R.R. Madden, and French writer Louise Swanton Belloc. They demonstrate how key insurgent ideas were forged through cultural exchange in more textured, dynamic historical complexity than we have yet grasped. As the project traces the resignification of political concepts that circulated the ports of the slaveholding Atlantic, into and out of French, Spanish, and English, it seeks to push the disciplinary boundaries of comparative Americanist or Atlanticist frameworks to treat translations as objects of study in their own right, worthy of sustained and systematic analysis.