ABSTRACT
Ethical quandaries regarding strategies for delivering, engaging, positioning, and incorporating texts that emerge from different national and cultural contexts have historically engendered a tradition of crisis, permeated by epistemological ruptures, through which the discipline of comparative literature has defined its deontological priorities and imperatives. Of course, by the time the Bernheimer Report emerged in 1993, the impetus and symbiotic entrenchment of postcolonial and postmodern literary theory had created a discursive atmosphere that attempted to dislodge the Eurocentric proclivity of the discipline. Selvon’s novel examines the sense of alienation that emerges from the liminal position of those who were full subjects of the British crown but were, nonetheless, excluded as “unauthentic” citizens or “outsiders.” Furthermore, many translators experiment with the target language in innovative ways as a means to capture local stylistic elements that mimic (while recreating) some discursive aspects of the original source.
