On Translation in a Global Market
Translation in a Global Market” focuses on the extent to which global artists, video makers, and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms. This special issue of Public Culture finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s midcentury critique of the American “culture industry” in the famous chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” of their Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 But whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School more generally focused their critique on how emergent capital logics were encoded in mass cultural forms, they paid little attention to questions of translatability across the complex cultural and social terrains of capital. The question of how one achieves a mass cultural object—a cultural object that can be translated across linguistic, cultural, and social contexts —still begs to be answered. This special issue explores a number of interrelated problems that arise from the question of a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. These problems include the marketing of national literature, the politics of publishing (with emphasis on the postcolonial dominance of Anglophone or standard-language publishing houses), and the question of an emergent internationalized aesthetics. When the problem of a globalizing mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important questions of cultural commodification and, thus, ideology arise. How do some works gain international visibility, while others do not?
These questions take on curricular and pedagogical urgency in the current rush to globalize the canon. The constraints imposed by what is available in translation in part determine the content of the transnational canon, which contributes another layer of complexity to the value-laden selection process of authors and serves as partial explanation for why “global lit” courses tend to feature similar rosters of non-Western authors (such as Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Tayeb Salih, Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy). The most obvious explanation—that these and other writers among the “happy few” are selected because they are universally acclaimed, excellent writers—obviously fails to fully account for their predominance. The difficulty of book distribution in many economically beleaguered countries remains an insuperable impediment to transnational exchange (a point made recently by the distinguished author Mongo Beti when he spoke of the dire situation in Cameroon).2 There are specialized niche markets within the “global” that contribute to fads and fashions (to wit, the current popularity of Indian English-language novelists and Irish playwrights), sorting writers into subcategories such as “international” (Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar, Samuel Beckett, Ferdinand Pessoa, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, Danilo Ki?s); “postcolonial” (Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Anita Desai, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mariama Bâ); and “multiculti,” “native,” or “minority” (Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sherman Alexie, Jessica Hagedorn, Gloria Anzaldúa, Haruki Murakami, Amitav Ghosh, Colm Tóibín). These labels, though they can help launch or spotlight world-class writers—pulling them out of ethnic area studies ghettos on the bookstore shelves—also cling like barnacles to their reception and afford constrictive stereotypes of identity. The Australian case is interesting in this regard: a strong, institutionally well-connected, London-based Australian poet like John Kinsella routinely fails to warrant inclusion in the global canon even though his poetry uses his native landscape to brilliant effect as the stage for futurist visitations by robots and psychics. Naturalized in the British and American literary market, his writing is not exotic enough, while a poet like Lionel Fogarty—whose dense, compelling verse incorporates Aboriginal language—fails to cross over because his writing remains too exotic for mainstream taste.
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Notes
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 120–67. Originally published as Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969).
- Mongo Beti, in a discussion session during a conference on “The Chosen Tongue” organized by Maryse Condé and Pierre Force at Columbia University’s Maison Française, 7–8 April 2000.