From the intersectional articulation in which postcolonial women's literature is produced, the agency of the translator as a figure of power when it comes to conveying the multiplicity of feminisms cannot be diminished.

Both feminism and postcoloniality are two concepts that have traditionally shown very diffuse epistemological boundaries. 

In the specific case of postcolonial literature, the term that should be used to define the field of study was already a problem. In fact, it has been called third world literature, world literatures, Commonwealth literature (limiting it only to literary productions of former colonies of the British Empire), new literatures in English (again, a limitation that excludes expressions artistic works in other languages) or tricontinental (which leaves out, for example, Maori writers of the stature of Witi Ihimaera). Another aspect that is clear today is that the prefix post- does not have a temporal nuance here, since as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out in a seminal work in postcolonial criticism, The Empire Writes Back (1992, 2), the adjective includes: “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.” Thus, the term postcolonial is not restricted by temporal or geographical limitations and the key issue seems to be the anticolonial or countercolonial orientation of its manifestations.

In the case of African feminisms, which is the geopolitical space on which I focus, there is a certain rejection of the term feminist, but of course there has always been resistance to patriarchy, movements, and survival strategies for everyday life. They have not seen themselves represented in the universality of white women's feminism. Their struggles have been in other places such as the fight against FGM or the economic struggles. Another characteristic of African feminisms is being aware of being crossed by different types of intersectionality: religion, race, ethnicity, economy , class, status, and age (to the detriment of young women). As Ochy Curiel said (in the context of intersectional feminisms in Abya Yala, in Latin America) in an interview in 2020, “gender does not explain our realities.”



The symposium Heterodoxy: Writing and Reading the Periphery, African Literature and Women (2024)

Some of the African feminisms that have had the most significance are womanism (a feminism that clearly manifests its intersection with race and social class), swiatism, motherism (highly criticized by other feminists), nego-feminism (which seeks negotiation with the closest men), misovire (working from a girls' drama school in Ghana and touring the continent), hembrism, snail feminism, and siyakaka.

Despite their rejection of the term, the majority of the African female writers are feminist since, in the words of the Equatorial Guinean writer and activist Remei Sipi, “their texts lead us to feminism.” BDAFRICA, our database of works by African authors published in Spanish and in Spain between 1972 and 2019 reflects that 22% of published writers are women as opposed to 78% men. We can also do a multivariate analysis of publication according to gender and country, and we find that the majority are writers, except in the cases of Benin, Mauritius, Somalia and Zimbabwe. And we find parity in Cameroon and Ghana.

What can we inferred from these data? What do we do with them? Well, what they reveal at a glance to us, translators, is what has not yet been translated.

Besides, they also represent, in a certain way, if we want to feel challenged, if we decide to consider ourselves agents of visibility, a call to action for which I propose four basic lines (inspired by some of those proposed by Olga Castro, 2018):

  1. Action in research, by assuming our agency from research, from Academia, and analyzing the work of the translators involved, how these authors are translated.
  2. Action in teaching, by including feminist texts (written and oral) from multiple sources in the Translation and Interpreting classrooms, allowing debate and analysis, and by starting a chain of action, both towards students and towards fellow teachers, promoting the inclusion of these contents in teaching guides so that it does not depend on the militancy, activism, or preferences of a particular teacher.
  3. Action in promoting  the translation of literary works by female authors, by discovering what has not been translated yet and by intervening in editorial dynamics and translation flows. In short, make these authors visible, because literature, as Melibea Obono (2018) says, is a “privileged space of expression, it is their space without censorship.”
  4. Action in fostering the translation of feminist non-fiction texts. It is time for afrofeminism to contribute to global social change, and presently there are few translations of feminist theories generated in African geopolitical contexts.

 

María Remedios Fernández-Ruiz receiving the Innovative Teaching and Improvement of Professional Practice Antonio Domínguez Ortiz (2019), for the research transfer project: “In your shoes: Inspiring personalities in STEAM and postcolonial literature for A-level students”.

In conclusion, we must admit the power of translation as an indispensable tool in the representation of transnational feminism to, as Remei Sipi (2022) says, “get to know each other and acknowledge each other.” This is an invitation to participate in this agenda that we propose, a call to action, to become a visibility agent to:

collaborate so that literature in feminine represents a universal experience, undermine and subvert power imbalances through activism, represent the heterogeneity of the concept of woman, and contribute to this transnational feminism, with the “counterhegemonic aspect that is reactivated through cross-border alliances” (Castro and Spoturno, 2019).