ABSTRACT
Godard examines the logic of complexity informing the vectors of cultural production and exchange between linguistically peripheral formations in the Americas, such as Brazil, Quebec, and anglophone Canada. Her analysis works explicitly both against the grain of comparative literature’s colonial hierarchization of literary value modeled in reference to an assumed European center, and against the homogenizing pressures toward capital-driven cultural integration in the Americas under the sign of US global hegemony. Stressing the importance of thinking through the “contact zone” of the Americas, with its ongoing forms of violence, erasure, and resistance, Godard invokes Glissant’s “poetics of relation” to offer a circumstantial account of both hegemonic and experimental modes of cultural production in Brazil and Canada, aimed either at “managing diversity” or drawing into ethical relation the conflictual entanglement of settler and Indigenous differences across the hemisphere. With an eye to the work of visual artists, directors, and writers who subvert settler narratives in both the Brazilian and Canadian contexts, Godard articulates her specific understanding of translation as an art of approach that constitutes transversal relations without incorporating them into a transcendental principle of sameness.
