Translation/Transnation²⁸

Emily Apter, Series Editor

Translation/Transnation is devoted to developing approaches and topics that place renewed emphasis on the literary dimension of transnationalism. It investigates the politics of language, accent, and literacy; translation and the global marketplace; comparative literary movements and genres; the future status of national assignations in textual classification; the need for new paradigms of comparative literary history and historiography; and related themes.

Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures Annette Damayanti Lienau
Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use...
The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia Haun Saussy
Debates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many centers, and one of them is China. The Making of Barbarians offers an account...
Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India Akshya Saxena
Against a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in the world today. A comparative study of three centuries of...
Learning Zulu: A Secret History of Language in South Africa Mark Sanders
"Why are you learning Zulu?" When Mark Sanders began studying the language, he was often asked this question. In Learning Zulu, Sanders places his own endeavors within a wider context to uncover how, in the past 150 years of South...
City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut Robyn Creswell
City of Beginnings is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. Robyn...
Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age Tarek El-Ariss
In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a...
Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care John T. Hamilton
From national security and social security to homeland and cyber-security, "security" has become one of the most overused words in culture and politics today. Yet it also remains one of the most undefined. What exactly are we talking...
In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt Michael Allan
We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that...
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon Edited by Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood
This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen...
The Novel and the Sea Margaret Cohen
For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands?...
Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War Andrew N. Rubin
Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert...
Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost Margaret Litvin
For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in...
The Event of Postcolonial Shame Timothy Bewes
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process...
The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century Mary Helen McMurran
Fiction has always been in a state of transformation and circulation: how does this history of mobility inform the emergence of the novel? The Spread of Novels explores the active movements of English and French fiction in the...
The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present Edited by David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi
As comparative literature reshapes itself in today's globalizing age, it is essential for students and teachers to look deeply into the discipline's history and its present possibilities. The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative...
In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination Gil Z. Hochberg
Partition--the idea of separating Jews and Arabs along ethnic or national lines--is a legacy at least as old as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Challenging the widespread "separatist imagination" behind partition, Gil Hochberg...
The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature Emily Apter
Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the...
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes Martin Puchner
Poetry of the Revolution tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the manifestos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from the Communist Manifesto to the manifestos of the 1960s and beyond, it highlights...
Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language Srinivas Aravamudan
Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the past two hundred...
Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature Nicholas Brown
Utopian Generations develops a powerful interpretive matrix for understanding world literature--one that renders modernism and postcolonial African literature comprehensible in a single framework, within which neither will ever look the...
Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation Edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood
In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original"...
The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress Isabel Hofmeyr
How does a book become an international bestseller? What happens to it as it is translated into different languages, contexts, and societies? How is it changed by the intellectual environments it encounters? What does the transnational...
We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship Étienne Balibar
Translated by James Swenson
étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We...
What Is World Literature? David Damrosch
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book...
Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb Réda Bensmaïa
Jean-Paul Sartre's famous question, "For whom do we write?" strikes close to home for francophone writers from the Maghreb. Do these writers address their compatriots, many of whom are illiterate or read no French, or a broader audience...
The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel Edited by Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever
The Literary Channel defines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and...
Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing Kirsten Silva Gruesz
This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both...
Writing Outside the Nation Azade Seyhan
Some of the most innovative writers of contemporary literature are writing in diaspora in their second or third language. Here Azade Seyhan describes the domain of transnational poetics they inhabit. She begins by examining the works of...