GG Kolloquium: Jacques Cartier: Empire, Emotion, Translation

Affective vocabulary is at the heart of European imperial projects in the Americas, and the manipulation of Indigenous emotion is central to early modern European discourses on colonization. In this talk I think through the slippages via which emotion is assigned to and translated from Indigenous experience into a European account, and then trace the way those accounts are translated into other languages. I want to foreground emotion’s translatedness: the metaphor of translation is fundamental to conversations in the history of emotions following William Reddy’s usage of the term to think through emotion’s movement from experience into words, but we don’t always think about the place of linguistic translation in our reflections on emotion. My case study is Jacques Cartier’s Bref recit et succincte narration of 1545, an account of Cartier’s second journey to Canada in 1535 and in itself a brief account of both colonial emotion and colonial translation.

^{Katherine Ibbett is Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She is the author of Compassion's Edge: Fellow-Feeling and its Limits in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and the co-editor, with Kristine Steenbergh, of Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently working on Liquid Empire, a project on early modern French rivers.}