Other Tongues

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines languages as a third point of entanglement that has both spatial and temporal ramifications while at the same time being sites where domination is both sustained and disrupted. It starts by describing the linguistic reality of the islands in the seventeenth century discussing how the plurilingualism that existed caused challenges for the narratives, which had to abide to contemporary aesthetics. The analysis show that travelers engaged with languages as praxes and were forced into conceiving languages as processual constantly changing in relation to other languages, existing languages as well as languages in the making. Focusing principally on Breton’s dictionary, it demonstrates how travelogues testify to the inherent creativity in language crossings. The second section looks at the inclusion of direct speech in travelogues as framed within codes of representation that dramatized Indigenous and enslaved peoples, staging them for particular purposes and following rhetorical conventions. The final section challenges these formal forms of representation looking at scenes of exchanges in everyday life asking how this expression of control over other peoples’ expression also turned into sites where others would “talk back.” Throughout the chapter, Glissant’s thoughts on the role of language in the shaping of French Caribbean Baroque as well as Sarduy’s reading of Baroque language will be made operative together with theories around hetero- and translingualism.