The Poetics of Imperialism

Book excerpt: The Poetics of Imperialism redefines the Anglo-American frontier in terms of problems of translation. Exploring questions of language and colonization, the book demonstrates how intracultural problems of translation--rooted in conflicts of race, gender, and class in the Western tradition of property--were projected onto the communal economics of kinship in the New World as the primary process of dispossession. In describing this process of translation, Cheyfitz examines a range of texts from European travel narratives to the work of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, and Leslie Marmon Silko; from The Tempest to Tarzan. This venture in the conjunction of critical theory and cultural studies cuts across the disciplines of literature, anthropology, and history within the context of critical theory.