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A special issue of French Cultural Studies in 1999 sought to explore the ways in which Modern Linguists have often tended to erase traces of their personal lives from their work. Contributors responded in an autobiographical mode by exploring the 'hidden selves of scholars and teachers'. This article builds on these reflections by exploring the extent to which Edgar Morin's Commune en France (1967), his contribution to the multidisciplinary project in Plozévet in Brittany, may be understood as 'autobiographie involontaire'. The study reads Morin's Journal de Plozévet (published in 2001, over three decades after the research was completed) in relation to the original monograph and suggests that the diary operates as the second panel of a diptych that reveals the texts' interdependence. The journal fulfils a 'genetic' function, providing the sources for elements of Morin's monograph and giving an indication of the extent to which Morin drew on the work of his wider team to complement his own observations. More importantly, however, reading the two texts in counterpoint – the one providing spontaneous reflections in the field; the other revealing their processing in the immediate aftermath of the enquête – is part of the revelation of the 'hidden selves' of a researcher embedded in a monograph that has been long considered a classic of post-war French sociology.

Those working on the Caribbean have regularly adopted the figures and practices of translation in their work and also have devoted attention to the study of various translational processes. The presence of the Caribbean in translation studies remains, however, considerably less evident. This essay reflects on this missed cross-disciplinary rendezvous, foregrounding the importance of questions of cultural translation in a Caribbean context but at the same time considering the practical intralinguistic and interlinguistic underpinnings of any analysis of translation in the Caribbean (and of the Caribbean in translation). Drawing on a number of examples, ranging from the relief effort following the Haitian earthquake in 2010 to current CARIFORUM and CARICOM language policy, the discussion focuses on the region as a translation zone. The essay concludes that although the Caribbean may be usefully defined in terms of translation, it is also essential—in reciprocal terms—that wider discussion of translation should itself be actively "Caribbeanized."

[P]ostcolonial studies has the potential to assemble new communities and networks of people who are joined by the common political and ethical commitment to challenging and questioning the practices and consequences of domination and subordination. Anyone can do it. We all come to things from our own positions, of course, and we are each of us enabled and blinkered by the location of our standpoint; but we all something to learn from, and contribute to, postcolonial studies.

Central to Madison Smartt Bell's trilogy of novels on the Haitian Revolution is the character of Toussaint Louverture. The article considers how Bell's Toussaint fits into two centuries of representations of the revolutionary leader, exploring in particular the ways in which his character is to be situated between historiography and fiction. It addresses the extensive documentary foundations of Bell's fictional account, while highlighting the imagined interpretations essential to this refiguring of the revolutionary.