Between Languages: Translation and Literatures from the South

This article proposes that the translation violence of the colonizing process—in terms of the confrontation between oral languages and ones with written grammars—coupled with the institutionalization of a given language as the national one, contains both a memory of the silencing of indigenous languages and cultures, and of transculturation. The latter, in turn, manifests itself, among other ways, through books that in different ways deal with the relationship between the West and descendants of the first-nation peoples of South America (especially in Circum-Roraima, the triple-border region between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana) and those of African descent (particularly in discussions about the use of the colonizer’s language or the indigenous languages by writers from former colonies).