The Global Minor: A Transnational Space for Decentering Literary and Translation History

ABSTRACT

Nothing has transformed literary and cultural studies over the last thirty years more than the great power dynamics of globalization and the critical theory vying to wrest power from the national paradigm. The global turn in literary studies has favored a significant rise in the study of translation. At the same time, a variety of other turns—the spatial turn,¹ the cultural turn,² and the transnational turn³—have also proved useful to the study of the global circulation of literature, as well as to rethinking key concepts, methods, and practices. Theoretical insights on space and place have called the locations we study into question, whereas boundaries and borders are now being erased or redrawn. In the case of translation, mapping multiethnic and multilingual texts has raised great interest because of the new linguistic relationships operating outside the source-and-target-language dichotomy. However, the enormous scope and scale of translation, combined with the broad linguistic and literary expertise required for its study in many languages and multiple geographical spaces, have allowed for very few comparative studies and large-scale research. This shortage is more evident when it comes to languages referred to as “minor,” “minoritized,” “ultraminor,” “peripheral,” “small,” or “less-translated.” Although widely discussed, these terms remain controversial.

Responding to multiform complexities, this special issue has four specific goals: (1) to briefly historicize those theories, approaches, and methodologies that have been more productive to the discussion of these notions and to develop new paths of inquiry within the framework of a decentered literary and translation history; (2) to reflect on new terms such as “global minor,” or, more briefly, “global translation zones,” helping to better acknowledge emerging relations and connections that are not mediated by the alleged “centers”; (3) to divert the focus from the prevailing role of the author to the relevant figures of cultural mediators⁴ and to analyze the specificities, habitus, and patterns of their relationships to the “minor” and to the wider world; and (4) to provide a wide range of case studies on literary translation (from the late nineteenth century on) that may show how all this corpus of literary texts engage in the transnational cultural space⁵ through different translation practices. This special issue advances the hypothesis that all these languages, cultures, and literatures are not only relevant in their own right, but also from a broader perspective and in their relationships to the rest of the world. In this respect, we are calling for the urgent need to rethink our representation of the “minor” and reassess its economic, symbolic, cultural, and social value, while reconsidering the theories we have at hand.

The Origins: Tracing the History of a Concept with Multiple Meanings

As literary and translation historians, we strive to convey how the concepts of the “minor,” the “minoritized,” the “ultraminor,” the “small,” the “peripheral,” or the “less-translated” supplement national, transnational, and global historiographies or how they are all entangled. However, can we possibly affirm that the distinction between these terms is sufficiently clear? Is “small” different from “minor”? And what can the concept of “minority” contribute to the study of translation?⁶ Despite the fact that some of these texts can be classified as world literature⁷ and that they have been studied separately or within national frameworks, “minor,” “minoritized,” “ultraminor,” “small,” “peripheral,” or “less-translated” languages have been mostly overlooked from the global perspective, and theoretical discussion around these terms is still in progress.

If we trace the history of the concept of “minor,” which has taken on multiple meanings and multiple terms, we may recall that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define “minor” literature as written by a “minority” in a “major” language (Francophone Belgian literature, for instance),⁸ but this definition has been recurrently criticized for overstressing the binary relationships between “minorities” and “major” cultures. In that respect, Michael Cronin discusses the idea of the “minor” in multiple works.⁹ Emphasizing that the concept of “minority” is always relational, he distinguishes between diachronic and spatial relations and argues that to be a “minority” is a historical experience that destabilizes the linguistic relations in one country, so that languages may change their status from “minor” to “major” and the other way around for political or historical reasons. He also explains that the “minority” is shaped by a spatial relationship in which language is placed in a “minority” position because of the remapping of national boundaries. Likewise, Lawrence Venuti takes the notion of “minority” to designate “a cultural or political position that is subordinated, whether the social context that so defines it is local, national or global.”¹⁰ Meanwhile, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih propose the term “minor transnationalism”¹¹ as a framework to discuss the literary production emerging from heterogeneous literatures, identities, and cultures. By focusing on their interactions and relationships, they have sought to unearth sometimes unapparent networks. On a different note, some authors have also distinguished between “minoritized” and “minority” languages,¹² with the latter referring to languages with a small number of speakers or to languages with little political power. Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult¹³ apply the term “minoritized” to understand the power differential between languages, considering many languages as “minoritized” despite being spoken by a majority, as with the Indigenous languages of the colonial period and even in Latin America today, or as is the case of “minority” languages in China. “Minoritized” can also refer to the marginalized status of endangered languages, “minoritized” communities such as the Romani people, and languages perceived as folklore (see Gonne in this volume regarding Walloon or Martín-Mor¹⁴ on Sardinian). Along these lines, the term “ultraminor” has been also used by Bergur Rønne Moberg and David Damrosch¹⁵ to offer a more nuanced view and refer to those texts written by a “minority” in a “minority” language. The term “ultraminor” has been proposed as a new concept in world literary studies¹⁶ and seeks to go beyond the binary opposition between “major” and “minor” literatures by analyzing case studies related to the literatures of the Faroe Islands, Malta, Mauritius, modern Sanskrit or the circulation of Shakespeare in Neapolitan language. However, despite this valuable effort to shed light into these “vibrant regional and linguistic communities,” the discussion on the “ultraminor” does not avoid the sense of subordination and verticality that we would like to overcome if we aim at studying “minor” literatures from a broader perspective and as horizontally interconnected. Likewise, the discussion about the differences between all these terms is still missing. Despite acknowledging their blurry boundaries, only in the first two paragraphs of the introduction to the special issue on the “ultraminor” as a new category, the following terms appear: “major powers,” “minor literatures,” “major languages,” “minority discourse,” “peripheral countries,” “major metropolitan centers,” “center-periphery relations,” “major/minor binary,” “ultraminor,” “minor literatures,” and “small cultural spaces.”

In view of this variety of definitions, it is fair to recall the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which defines regional or “minority” languages as both “(i) traditionally used within a given territory of a state by nationals of that state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the state’s population and (ii) different from the official language(s) of that state, on the understanding that such definitions do not include either dialects of the official language(s) of the state or the languages of migrants.” According to this already well-known definition,¹⁷ the term “minority language” is not to be confused with “minor language.”

As a telling example of the notion of “small,” Miha Kovač applies it to the size of a given country (i.e., Lithuania), without taking the number of speakers into account. However, while a market might be “small,” the size of a national literature is not so easily defined. Kovač applies “small” to small European national communities (Slovenia or Bulgaria) in terms of population and has pointed out that these “small” communities always had a second language, the language of the empire to which these communities belonged. To Kovač, this second language often proved “a window to the broader cultural and scientific world as it was impossible to translate all significant literal and scientific works into these small languages.”¹⁸ In similar terms Elke Brems, Orsolya Réthelyi, and Tom van Kalmhout applied “small” to the circulation of literature from the Low Countries,¹⁹ as Ondrej Vimr does it too in relation to his work on the circulation of translations between Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Scandinavian countries.²⁰ However, this understanding may reinforce again a sense of subordination, verticality, and opposition, instead of seeing all these languages and literatures as horizontally interconnected. As it has also pointed out by Atkin,²¹ any discussion of the processes and networks through which the literatures of “small” nations come to be translated is a discussion of power.

Finally, within a world system perspective, Itamar Even-Zohar’s influential work²² has also discussed the causes and effects of translated literature holding a “central” or “peripheral” position in a country’s literary system, whereas the notion of the “peripheral” adopted by Johan Heilbron²³ to analyze a world system of translations, following Abram De Swaan’s²⁴ world system of languages and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory,²⁵ have proliferated as a way of referring to circulation phenomena based on socioeconomic relations. The idea of hierarchies and competing factions is also perceived in Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known field theory.²⁶ In that respect, we may add to the discussion the “dominant” and “dominated” binary established by the French sociologist to study the autonomization of the literary field. Bourdieu analyzes the relationship between the literary field and the field of power, as well as the role of agents (their habitus) and the place of institutions in the literary field. Within a bourdieusian perspective, Pascale Casanova’s work also included a few years later a transnational dimension to the world literary space, which was structured by its “centers” and “peripheries” and the Greenwich meridian. Her work in the Republic of Letters evolved in a discussion about world languages in her book La langue mondiale. Traduction et domination,²⁷ which reinforces this idea of “central” and “peripheral” languages, all trying to struggle on the international arena.

We may end this brief discussion with Albert Branchadell’s work,²⁸ who coined the term “less-translated languages” to define those languages that circulate less. The idea of less-translated literatures is also related to the concept of “lesser-used languages,” as applied by the European Union regarding linguistic diversity issues (see Kvirikashvili and Gonne in this volume). However, as pointed out by Brems, Réthelyi, and van Kalmthout, this term may not deal with the “minor” and “major” dichotomy, as it “offers a number of Western languages a chance to escape the (ideologically tinted) role of dominant languages.” Without delving into this reflection too deeply, that most of these researchers are of “peripheral” origin stands out: Cronin is Irish; Even-Zohar is Israeli; Branchadell is Catalan; Kovac is Slovenian; Heilbron is Dutch; Brems and van Kalmthout are Flemish; Réthelyi is Hungarian; Moberg is Danish; Shih from Chinese origins, and Lionnet is Franco-Mauritian. Meanwhile the editors of the special issue at hand are Catalan and Georgian.

While I do not seek to define these terms in depth, as I understand them as embodying different meanings and critical dimensions of the “minor”—whether socioeconomic, sociolinguistic, political, cultural, or literary—I would like to point out the various fields with which they have engaged to help situate this special issue and circumscribe our conceptual discussion in the light of literary translation history, even though most of the premises can be also applied to global translation flows of other kinds of translation. Criteria for referring to all these terms may include (1) the presence of linguistic minorities or language hierarchies, even though the apparent “centrality” of a language does not always match the “centrality” of a literature, as when “minority” writers use a “major” language; (2) nationality or belonging to a region or supranational or sub-state culture—as with the literatures of Maghreb, the Caribbean, or India, or literature in Galician²⁹ (3) demography and number of speakers (Chinese or Arabic are certainly not “peripheral,” despite being less-translated or disseminated in terms of circulation and reception); (4) economic and market statistics of translation flows; (5) the symbolic capital of a language/literature/culture; and (6) the political implications of the “minor,” with Indian or African literatures being highly controversial because they contend with the languages of the colonizer (English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish). This special issue will use these terms according to the meanings and dimensions discussed above, but I will focus here on the notion of the “minor” for the conceptual model we would like to propose. As I will explain below, this model is grounded in the transnational space of what I have called the “global minor” and is more aligned with Lionnet and Shih’s, as well as with Cronin’s relational view that “minority is always dynamic rather than static and is always relational.”³⁰ As stated above, Cronin’s relational approach considers two aspects—diachronic and spatial—but I will develop this model further by pointing out the five fundamental concepts of space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. I will not discuss these concepts at length, as they have been already described elsewhere,³¹ but they guide the following discussion.

Between Politics and Academia: The Institutionalization of the “Minor”

In recent years, the global circulation of literature has drawn increased attention and has been conceptualized from multiple perspectives. In literary studies, it is commonplace to ask ourselves what it means to study world or global literature (based on a planet scale) and how we can reasonably manage to do so. The renewal of comparative literature and the perspective of world literature, based on David Damrosch’s understanding of world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading,³² have brought relevant issues to the fore, such as the effort to globalize the literary canon or the idea of a planetary system opposing the doxa of national literatures. However, the idea of the “minor” has often remained within the boundaries of the local, with scarce dialogue or transference between other scales. Indeed, “minor,” “small,” “peripheral,” or “less-translated” languages and literatures have often been seen from a national or regional point of view, and less so from a comparative or global perspective. With a few exceptions, the circulation of these literatures remains underrepresented in literary and translation studies conferences, and integrating the notion of the “minor” in translation studies remains a challenge, as it is often easier to include examples in French and English than in languages that have circulated less on the international level. The same holds for general handbooks on world literary studies and translation history. Indeed, fundamental works such as the Routledge Companion to World Literature³³ have paid little attention to the impact of this new focus on truly “small” languages and lesser-known or less-circulating literatures. This is also the case for relevant works such as A Companion to Translation Studies³⁴ and more recent works in translation studies such as the Routledge Handbook of Translation History.³⁵ None of them directly tackle the structural problems of addressing the world in terms of specific languages and literatures at the expense of others, despite their grappling with universalizing paradigms such as the idea of global English as a lingua franca. In the case of the four volumes of the Handbook of Translation Studies,³⁶ which was initially published in 2011, only the fifth volume, which was published ten years later, in 2021, includes a chapter by César Domínguez on world literature and translation.³⁷ Thus, besides certain chapters on postcolonial issues related to translation and “peripheral” literatures analyzed from a national perspective (as with Turkish and Japanese literature), these handbooks discuss dichotomies such as global and local languages—labels that inadvertently reinforce the boundaries we seek to overcome. Thus, though translation is central to world literature, “minor” and “less-translated” languages have mostly been overshadowed in favor of those in which European “major” literatures have played a central part. Indeed, world literary studies have promoted the translation of said literatures, in close proximity with the territory of the nation, despite the fact that translation flows can occur between territories, places, and networks. If we consider the many languages of the world, and the new body of texts that comes into view in light of the global perspective, it seems clear that we need broader frameworks beyond those privileging English-, German-, or French-language literatures as if they were applicable worldwide. All literatures should be of equal value, but many key, recent works on comparative and world literature still show their sympathies toward an English, French, or German context, keeping the rest of the world in the shadows. Territorial inequalities remain salient, as does the fact that the world system of translation privileges English as a global language and grants visibility according to the interests of the global publishing industry and the global academic discourse, which, in turn, obscures “minor,” literatures and research written in other language than English.³⁸

A large part of the problem is the fact that many European and North American researchers have a scarce knowledge of non-Western languages and literatures and non-Western historiographical traditions, along with the observation that many researchers working on “less-translated” languages are asked to provide contextual information that would never be required of case studies on the translation of Victorian literature or Symbolist poetry, for instance. Therefore, we must problematize our labels and categories and ask ourselves for whom translations are significant and what their value, impact, or relative centrality is depending on our vantage point. Lionnet and Shih³⁹ define the “global” as a homogeneous and dominant set of criteria, highlighting the relevance of the transnational in terms of spaces and practices being performed by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal. However, in our understanding of the global, this term can be conceived in the opposite way, as a heterogeneous and more inclusive history of connections and networks built across an ample geography over time.⁴⁰

“Minority” discourses and reflections on “peripheral” literatures in broader studies have not been sufficiently addressed in relatively recent works on globalization and global literatures, cosmopolitanism, and literary transnationalism, such as those published by Jameson and Miyoshi,⁴¹ Robbins and Horta,⁴² and Spivak.⁴³ And it is fair to recognize that a Western (Euro-American) approach has prevailed for many decades in comparative literature departments. As I have suggested elsewhere,⁴⁴ area studies and comparative postcolonial and diaspora studies have proved relevant in defining the notion of the “minor” and have aimed at provincializing Europe, focusing on the resistances to European culture developing across many parts of the world. But Latin America is often forgotten in most discussions within postcolonial comparative studies, which mainly focus on English and French. As Cronin claimed years ago, “the signal failure to account for the linguistic and translational complexity of Europe in part stems from the tendency by postcolonial critics to reduce Europe to two languages, English and French, and to two countries, England and France. Thus, the critique of imperialism becomes itself imperialist in ignoring or marginalizing the historical and translation experience of most European languages.”⁴⁵

On the other hand, postcolonial studies have provided a gateway to the world beyond the West, but while colonialism has formally ended in many parts of the world, postcolonial reality remains tethered to imperial powers. Postcolonial studies have also been criticized for homogenizing “minority” cultures. Likewise, in the cases we are discussing in this special issue, postcolonial criticism has also focused on a specific segment of world literature—literature from the colonies—but this is not always applicable to the analysis of “small” literatures from, for instance, Western or Southern Europe. Therefore, debates must go beyond comparison between West and East to include a broader range of scales and literary and translation flows that may constitute a global translation zone, in the terms I will explain below, even when these flows do not always experience direct contact or are contained in a national paradigm. Indeed, multiple controversies over the so-called national literatures and identities that world literature espouses have raised scholarly debates.⁴⁶ Key concepts such as diaspora, exile, empire, movement, circulation, and multilingualism have been used to study agents of translation and their activities abroad, but national, regional, local, and monolingual frameworks remain dominant in many literary and translation historiographies. Discussions around the problematic representation of “minor” languages and literatures or the broad and often biased representation of larger regions such as Latin America or Africa are still missing.

Thus, despite growing interest over the last few years, the meanings and applications of the “minor” in world literary studies and translation studies have not been sufficiently theorized, as Cronin already highlighted almost two decades ago,⁴⁷ and our purpose is to rethink this spectrum of concepts in the field of translation studies and translation history, more specifically, in order to redefine our categories and their applicability. Indeed, comparative literature, world literary studies, and translation studies have used these terms often interchangeably and have generally focused on so-called central languages, according to a center-periphery model or, at best, on the relationships between “minority” languages. But there is still a lot of research to be done with regard to the analysis of south-to-south literary exchanges or to the relations between the so-called “peripheral” languages. One of the main reasons why it remains difficult to find researchers who can manage the flows between so-called peripheral literatures is that specializations tend to be cultivated within national frameworks and university programs, which are also founded upon the same analytical framework in most cases. Along these lines, some research has been gladly undertaken in relation to the translation and intercultural transfers between Swedish Czech,⁴⁸ East Asian and African literatures translated into Urdu,⁴⁹ and adaptations from the Arabic into Tamil, Javanese, and Malay.⁵⁰ Although the field of global translation history is currently in its infancy, the phenomenon itself is not, and “minorities” and translation flows have circulated since antiquity. In this respect, instead of analyzing the translation of texts into or between “major” historical languages and literatures (like English, French, or German), we propose measuring interperipheral relations. In the transnational space of the “global minor,” we may find “minor,” “minoritized,” and “less-translated” literatures, as well as migrant and conflicting languages between exiled individuals and communities. In specific cases, we can also see how “major” historical languages and literatures interact with this more marginalized corpus of texts. Again, we should ask ourselves, what is the rule and what is the exception, and shift our assumptions when analyzing both inter- and intracultural transfers.

In this vein, despite the general lack of attention to the “minor” embedded in the global perspective, the recently published Cambridge History of World Literature (2021), edited by Debjani Ganguly, has attempted to fill this gap with a specific section called “World Literature and Translation” and some chapters on, for example, “global Tamil,” understanding Tamil literature as transcending the geography of India and Sri Lanka, as well as Singapore and Malaysia. The same holds true for the journal in translation studies mTm minor Translating major- major Translating minor- minor Translating minor, and for some recent conferences and scientific meetings. Specifically, the international conference at the University of Ottawa “Translation and Minority,” organized in November 2016, the workshop “Between the nation and the world: the role of translation in the circulation of small/minor/peripheral/less-translated literatures,” organized by the editors of this special issue in June 2020, and the recent conferences “World literature and the minor: figuration, circulation, translation,” organized in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2021, and, for the specific field of audiovisual, “Audiovisual Translation and Minority Cultures,” held at the University of Pescara, Italy, in June 2022. Notwithstanding these developments, there is still little theoretical work on the specificities of these cases and on the differences between them. Indeed, it has been assumed that “minor” literatures play a marginal role in the global literary system, but we should ask ourselves whether the theories we have at hand are suited to highlight the relevance of these literatures or if these theoretical frameworks favor a limited set of languages and literatures.

In this respect, theory has not built common ground the world over but needs to be adapted to the cultural, social, historical, and political contexts in which these theories are applied. As Damrosch has argued, “the need for viable theoretical frameworks has only increased, given the expansion of comparative studies to a much broader engagement with the world’s literatures.”⁵¹ Therefore, we need to begin to draw more attention to those theories emerging outside European and U.S. American academies. The study of “minor,” “small,” “minoritized,” “peripheral,” and “less-translated” literatures has been often undertaken for ethical reasons backed by stalwart political views, however, as stated above, they should also be studied in their own right, from a broader perspective, in terms of their relationships to the wider world. The social engagement behind the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements should resonate in the vindication of the “minor” and the “minoritized,” perhaps leading to new university programs, theoretical discussions, and technologies and methodological tools that can appropriately analyze their specificities. Interacting with postcolonial studies from the onset, and at the intersection of literature and activism, the translation of “minor,” “minoritized,” “small,” “peripheral,” or “less-translated” literatures contributes to cultural diversity. Thus, translations should stand as a central category for empirical studies on global literature and the spatial turn. Despite some developments, our disciplines are unfortunately still far from adopting translated literatures among their main concerns.

It would be also a mistake to forget that a researcher’s commitment to only working in two or three (mostly European) languages beyond English does not help either. Traditional comparative literature has often engaged with problematic binaries such as source-target and original-translation flows. In this respect, a multilingual perspective in our scholarship is still a promise to be fulfilled and a much-needed critical dimension. For all of these reasons, this special issue acknowledges the emergence of alternative terms such as “ecosystems,”⁵² “writing-between-worlds,”⁵³ “significant geographies,”⁵⁴ “global translation zones,”⁵⁵ and “genre communities” (see Bilal in this volume), which seek to understand plural and multilingual histories of literature and translation and to produce more inclusive representations of the “minor.” The goal of these concepts is to recognize the significant biases of writing literary and translation history in exclusively national terms and the need to propose alternative models for a better understanding of multinational languages and multilingual authors, texts, and spaces, which are not always related to a geographical paradigm. In some specific cases, these alternative terms also recognize the need to include new geographies and scales, as well as a longue durée perspective, which is relevant for “dead” languages or for languages which have evolved from being the “major” language of a bounded space to becoming exclusively a transnational liturgical language, as in the case of Coptic. These alternative terms also acknowledge the challenges of labeling literatures as “peripheral,” “minor,” “minoritized,” “small,” “less-translated,” “marginal,” or “dominated” when seeking to include certain literatures in world and global literary studies, as these notions can reinforce the barriers we aim to overcome. Therefore, do we still need to talk about “minor,” “small” literatures, or should we eschew using these terms? Undoubtedly, we cannot deny that the use of these terms are giveaways of reified thought, and even though we deploy these terms methodologically, we must assume that there are many “centers” and multiple “peripheries” that are not fixed or immovable, but dynamic and in constant change and evolution. Dichotomies such as north and south, or dominated and dominating, are not universal and eternal. Rather, they are the consequence of colonial legacies and Western thought. Thus, we should consider the “global” beyond colonial relationships, while being careful not to produce new blind spots. Thinking about the “minor” in relation to politics also means thinking about the political strategies of nation states: how do we deal with translations, and how do we study their structures, institutions, agents, and diplomatic figures?

Within this general historiographical framework, we seem to find ourselves in a new chapter of our theoretical discussion as we struggle with the hegemonic power of a limited set of languages and literatures by proposing an open canon of literatures and texts, which would imply reviewing our hierarchies, the respatialization of our units of analysis, and the mapping of specific local collectivities, mediators, and translations across a broader geography and time frames using multiple scales. While world literature would view the “global” as a layered sphere, we understand it more as a network in the transnational space in which these literatures may meet directly or indirectly. To do so, I propose the concept of the “global minor” as a literary transnational space, a conceptual model grounded in five fundamental concepts—space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency—⁵⁶ for the analysis of any discipline of global reach. The transnational space of the “global minor” allows us to search for similarities, differences, and patterns between the global translation zones in which languages and literatures circulate. The “global minor” may help us to understand otherness without turning it into sameness. In this respect, the relationships between “minor,” “small,” “peripheral,” or “less-translated” literatures, depending on the critical dimension we assume, are analyzed horizontally and in relation to each other, and not in opposition.

Likewise, the idea of global translation zones is not aimed at replacing geographical models or disciplinary fields (like area studies or oceanic studies) but point to lesser-known channels of circulation for translations or to cartographies or geographies of any kind that relate to each other through direct or indirect contact. For example, we may compare Indigenous literatures from different parts of the world, observe “minor” or “minoritized” literatures in which self-translation emanates as the main channel of circulation, or analyze the global circulation of a certain genre in “peripheral” literatures such as Tamil or Japanese literatures, both of which boast long traditions of poetry and poetic forms. In this sense, we might also compare Indigenous languages in terms of a spatial zone like the Andes—a zone of translation in which various national spaces converge. These examples thus consider geographic and thematic criteria.

Along these lines, we would also push for a deep understanding of what a cultural mediator is, a more nuanced view of the author, and appreciation for the different ways of measuring the success or failure of the circulation of translations. The theoretical success of a work in translation can be measured according to the number of editions of the translation, as well as by adaptations, and the diversity languages to which a work is translated. Still, print runs of translations are often low, meaning that a marked contrast may arise between a work’s simultaneously ample circulation in terms of geographic distribution and variety of languages yet limited sales. National institutes also perform cultural mediation and often boost translation zones between “smaller” literatures that are visibilized through translation programs, as with Institut Ramon Llull’s promotion of Catalan literature abroad, with some Catalan authors being translated to languages considered “peripheral,” such as Bulgarian, Serbian, and Hungarian. In short, we will treat literatures, writers, and texts more equally if we move past narrow focuses on markets and sales. Thus, the idea of the “global minor” may show us different kinds of collectivities and a broad range of spaces beyond the nation.

If we get back to the alternative terms we were suggesting above, we may observe how all of them—“ecosystems,” “significant geographies,” “global translation zones,” and “genre communities”—underscore that world literary studies must rethink the idea of space in a more plural, flexible, and evolving way. They also stand as means to explore translation and the circulation of literature through different scales and contexts. They can allow us to simultaneously analyze the similarities and differences between these literatures, be they historical or transhistorical (Foucault and Derrida), and their role in the global literary marketplace. An analysis of the “minor” and apparently “peripheral” from a global perspective also attests to processes of de- and reterritorialization. And it confirms the multidirectionality of exchanges; the multidirectional effects of translation flows; that multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception; the transnational character of communities; the practices of rewriting, self-translation, and collaborative writing exercises; and a shift away from the centrality of authors, who are beginning to yield the limelight to translators, readers, editors, literary agents, and cultural mediators in the broad sense. On a different level, the idea of the “minor” is also related to ethnicity or sex. While we do not deal specifically with literatures of migration or queer experiences in relation to marginalized communities, these could inform our understanding of the “global minor” as related to ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class, and could be also informed by the idea of intersectionality as a framework.

In short, the institutionalization of the “minor” as a literary world in its own right offers new and inspiring comparative opportunities for global literary studies and global translation history, but it still poses some methodological challenges, as we will see below.

The Problem of Comparison and the Concept of the “Global Minor”

As I pointed out in the previous section, one of the first methodological challenges to reach a better understanding of the idea of the “minor” within a broader context is the fact that most well-known perspectives have emerged among academic elites in Western Europe and the United States. The prevailing comparison between Western literatures in literary historiography has inevitably produced significant biases as this means to work with a limited corpus of texts. The second challenge I would like to underline is the absence of sufficient theorization, or the use of theories that cannot adequately trace literary history or translation flows outside of Europe or the Western literary world, as the vast scholarship of Latin America, Africa, and Asia is not always easily available, while academic literature written in languages other than English is rarely cited. The authors of this special issue also stress the need to find new terms and theories, and most of them critically discuss the theories we already have at hand: Fólica and Talento grapple with the “center” and “periphery” model sketched by Heilbron; Gonne reviews Branchadell’s reference to “less-translated” languages; Bilal delves into Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities; and almost all of the researchers in this issue call into question the main features of world literature. While not all researchers’ view the nation–state approach to literature as expired, it is clear that world literature must reconsider space and collectivities in a more plural, flexible, and fluctuating way. Such considerations are behind the proposal of alternative terms (“significant geographies,” “genre communities,” “global translation zones”) that have emerged over the last few years. We have also sought to introduce them within the debates around world literature—for example, with respect to the significant geographies of Indigenous languages and the plurality of directions and multiplicity of effects that transfer activities such as translation may imply. In parallel, areas that have been less studied from the postcolonial perspective, such as Latin America, or the invisibilization of European “peripheries” (the Balkans, regions like Galicia and Catalonia, or archipelagos, among others), should also be considered in terms of the fertile debates around world literature.

In this respect, we also need to face the challenge of incorporating the study of what does not circulate, or the sociology of absences in Jorge Locane’s terms,⁵⁷ in order to avoid an inherently positive outlook on circulation, which is especially important in the literatures being studied in this issue. Likewise, we might recognize the relevance of relatively new theories to study the emergence, organization, self-organization, or lack of stabilization of “minor” cultural systems, such as relational thinking and complexity theory (see Gonne in this volume). We should also note the fact that the study of smaller, “less-translated” literatures is an interdisciplinary branch. At the crux of literary studies, sociolinguistics, history, the history of translation, and, most recently, the digital humanities and data-driven approaches, makes it hard to find common theoretical and methodological frameworks despite the circulation of a few theoretical borrowings for which the challenge is not only to apply previous theoretical approaches, but also to exploit the enormous potential of multiple theories and methodological toolkits generated in other fields. In this respect, we might consider, the need for specific methodological models, be they channels, clusters, global translation zones, or methods for bottom-up research, which may help us to better define levels of “centrality” or “peripherality,” as well as to trace intra- and intercultural transfers. We also face the challenge of working on a large scale and the potential and limitations of the global and transnational approach. How should we deal with comparing specific, disparate, historical contexts or China and a broad region such as Latin America? Cultures can vary unfathomably, and comparison is often easier for literatures that are closer or share a common history. Still, to simplify and interpret Latin American literatures as a sole unit, for instance, instead of considering the differences between Mexican and Peruvian literatures, poses a hurdle, too. Likewise, despite the fact that this special issue seeks to decentralize literary and translation history, our external reviewers have interestingly requested that some authors proffer a contextual background of the languages and literary fields under study. In this respect, the editors and authors espouse a different perspective, believing that “minor” languages and literatures should not be required to explain themselves in the international arena. The authors of this special issue also acknowledge that we live in a multilingual world and thus oppose a monolingual idea of culture, which has been the “norm” for many years. They have also called traditional binaries such as that of source–target language or original-translation into question. This is the case of the article written by Denise Merkle, who problematizes what constitutes the original, and what, a translation, when it comes to the bilingual authors who, in her case study, published in English first despite stating that they penned their work in an Indigenous language from Canada.

On a different level, we must also consider the challenge of the archive and the corpus given the often absent archives on “minor” languages, literatures, and cultures, as in the case of Walloon, while the scarcity or lack of references in databases such as Index Translationum is also a great challenge. Issues related to the potentials and pitfalls of network science and big translation history⁵⁸ also come to the fore when studying “less-translated languages and literatures.” Likewise, issues regarding appropriate software and computing technologies, as well as the quality of data may also emerge: certain data sets are too small and messy, especially when compared to datasets from other fields of research. In the latter case, data sharing and collaboration with other projects and institutions might provide a solution.

In short, the category of the “global minor” may illuminate cross-scale analysis as well as the many worlds interacting as part of this transnational space. All these worlds communicate through translation flows and the movement of people. For those adopting critical approaches to a world system, the “global minor” might be a new comparative methodology lying between the generalities of a “system” and the particularities of specific regions. We may compare it to what has been called the interregional arena or what has been labelled as the “multilingual local.”⁵⁹ Translation flows are not nationally defined. Thus, the “global minor” is not a national history, as it is not grounded in those historiographies that take the nation as a unit of analysis. Nor does it constitute an international history describing the connections between different nations. This is not imperial history either, as translation flows endow us with the capacity to trace literary and translation history from a place of “otherness” instead of from the metropoles or through the lens of European expansion or the economic modern world system. We can see how the “global minor” leads to new epistemologies, relations that emerge from “periphery” to “periphery,” and innovative models in which “minor literatures” are not merely seen as bases for national identities and sociopolitical formations.

Quite the contrary, such literatures can be analyzed within a global view over time and space, as they are often rooted in collectivities such as the Jewish diaspora, the Islamic ummah, or the Urdu novel community (see Bilal in this volume). In this sense, the idea of the “global minor” recalls the unfortunate consequences of organizing literature according to nation state or “national” parameters alone, instead of calling for the analysis of circulation in a transnational space that may exist within a national framework (as in Georgia or Canada) or beyond. This is why we also question the way literature is organized in political institutions and universities (see Carbó-Catalan and Bilal in this issue). Thus, the “global minor” is a new geography emerging in the larger context of global translation history from a relational and network perspective. To illustrate this, we may note, for example, that some forms traveled from “periphery” to “periphery,” and from the “periphery” to the “center.” The poetic form of the haiku originated in Japanese, but acquired new meanings in its circulation to French and other literatures (such as the Mexican one). The “global minor” can help understand the hybrid nature of many cultures and the transversal connections between their networks, including the agents acting as intermediaries (cultural mediators), and “minority” writers using “major” or “minor” languages. The “global minor” may also “deconstruct homogenized national cultures, languages, and literatures and rediscover not only their own specificities, but also their hybridity.”⁶⁰ Thus, the “global minor” is neither global nor purely local. It is based on relations that may be more horizontal than vertical, in comparison to the center-periphery model. Still, we must ask ourselves what the value of the “minor” really is. How local is the local? How can the “minor,” “minoritized,” and “less-translated” be relevant from a broader perspective? Is it relevant if a connection or a translation flow is “peripheral” or not? The uniqueness of this volume lies at the core of these interrogations, and it is our purpose to stress that the “minor” is in fact the center and the norm, and not an exception. The “minor” can raise awareness around how unevenness can be brought into play. Instead of considering Western European experiences at the center, the transnational space of the “global minor” may shed light on translation flows based on hybrid identities.

Translation does not limit itself to a fixed corpus of texts, and being translated or consecrated through translation may cause one text or writer to travel from “periphery” to “semi-periphery,” or to the “center” of the world literary field. In this respect, if we aim at decentralizing literature and translation, we should trace the histories emerging from the “peripheries,” a category that should not be ascribed to any literature or culture in particular, but to entangled histories and ongoing processes of transformation. This, in turn, resists diffusionist paradigms and the idea of innovative centers and imitative peripheries. Above all, what has been considered as “minor” may become “central” depending on the perspective and the networks under study. Indeed, using these terms too restrictively can obscure relevant literary constellations in geographies that eschew the purview of the so-called literary centers and the significance of, for example, intermediate languages in Swahili translation flows (see Talento in this volume). Once again, the dynamism and volatility of such translation flows must also be considered. What changes do we experience when we modify our point of view and replace our assumption of European dominance with that of Japanese or Chinese domination? Through translation and mediation, the “minor” can be transformed into a major force in new contexts. Depending on the vantage point, East Asia can emerge as a new center.

The “global minor” can also be understood as a transit zone in which “peripheral” literatures interact and cross-cultural contacts are set in motion. Indeed, the “minor” may involve many border-transgressing themes, but the translation of “minorities” has mainly been studied from a national point of view, and less so from transregional and global perspectives. As a result, translation practices emerge as embedded in self-translation, indirect translation, intra-translation, or the rewriting of national images and representations. In short, through the idea of the “global minor,” we seek to produce a new spatial frame showing the complex interplay between the various layers of a bounded territory and other nonterritorial forms of space. We perceive the “global minor” as a complex system whose evolution we cannot predict. We observe the openness of an ecosystem that lacks stability for some specific literatures (see the case of Walloon literature in this volume). The “global minor” may also include genres with blurred geographical boundaries such as migrant and refugee writing. Indeed, it would be fair to acknowledge that the space of the “global minor” is not harmonious, but can involve social conflicts, political crises, interreligious frictions, or tensions of all kinds. This is what we observe in the cases of Turkish, Japanese, and Swahili in this volume.

The “global minor” also shows why stateless and regional cultures can be interesting from a larger perspective. Most works are published in languages that are still considered “peripheral” and “semiperipheral.” Undoubtedly, focusing on the “center” alone neglects production in other languages. To counter this, we must understand that even though German is a “central” language, it circulates less than many other “peripheral” languages when they are taken together. Still, from the perspective of the “global minor” and considering global translation zones as units of analysis, we may see how German plays an important role in the circulation of literatures from the Caucasus, as many of them were first translated into German. “Centrality” and “peripherality” may adopt very different meanings depending on the context. Likewise, we may reconsider the meanings of other terms. How should we understand value? In Bourdieusian terms, we may think about economic, symbolic, cultural, and social value, but what if we problematize this category and consider what is valuable to us, as researchers or readers? What is centrality to me? Value and significance might mean very different things if we focus on personal perspectives. While the works by Johan Heilbron, among others, may confirm some a priori expectations, opening ourselves to new case studies might lead to opposite conclusions. Translation flows are often mapped within the power dynamics of nation states, but sometimes translations flow beyond national frameworks. At a regional level, these maps no longer work. In the case of Heilbron’s research on Dutch literature, there are blind spots in relation to the Flemish perspective. Debating translocal flows and emphasizing the mediators’ role would strengthen multiple channels, layers, and interplays between different scales. Encounters often occur locally and regionally before jumping to a larger scale. Thus, some regions and “minor” literatures may be more active in the promotion of translation flows when abetted by their own institutions (e.g., by national institutes for the promotion of culture and translation). Likewise, we still do not fully understand the interactions and flows between many regions due to a lack of research on or access to certain literatures and languages (as with Chinese, Arabic, and others) from our often-centralized spaces of investigation. These regions have established translation flows with other parts of the world, which are now seeing more and more research (e.g., the relations between China and Latin America have been studied). Again, the category of the “global minor” aims at underscoring the connections between these literatures and corpora of texts, not in an attempt to homogenize them, but to stress their differences, similarities, and patterns.

By analyzing the “minor” within this perspective, we allow various themes related to these broad areas to emerge and which obviously overlap one to the other one: “minor” literatures and soft power, which may include translation and nation building, and public and private initiatives in relation to translation driven by governments, cultural relations, academia, or media such as journals; agents and cultural mediators, or the agency of individuals in the translation of “minorities,” many women among them; “minor” literatures and the market, including the discussion on consecration institutions; audiences and readership; and practices of translation, including self-translation, indirect translation, collaborative writing, multilingualism, and oral transmission. I will delve into them in light of the case studies we have gathered in this volume.

Crossing Our Case Studies: Themes of the “Minor”⁶¹

Deploying an ethical approach, this special issue gathers different case studies that have been selected for their geographical representativity and diverse subject matters. In contrast to previous works, some of our contributors engage in bottom-up analysis. We include research discussing intranslation, extranslation, but also strategies to establish cultural and paradiplomatic relations, thus stressing the relevance of global power struggles for cultural legitimization and the deep entanglements between translation, cultural relations, politics, and the autonomization of the literary field.⁶² We present case studies that shed light on linguistic, literary, and cultural problems across a broad geographical space. Thus, some articles analyze translation into Indigenous languages from Canada and Latin America, while others address practices of self-translation in supranational languages like Yiddish and the languages of Indigenous Latin America. Likewise, we include examples of regional languages such as Catalan and Walloon and the challenges they have faced to promote interperipheral exchanges and mitigate their invisibility throughout history, via more or less institutionalized initiatives of cultural diplomacy and networks of regional solidarity.

The political function of literary translation and our understanding of culture as soft power⁶³ are also well-represented through an analysis of the relations between Japanese and Korean literatures and the different degrees of their literatures’ minorization therein. A focus on the place of translation in nation building and the relevance of cultural relations, cultural projection abroad, and translation policies for “small” and “less-translated” languages can also be found among these pages. We assume a multifold understanding of regions, which may include examples of sub-State regions like Wallonia or Catalonia, but also supranational regions such as the Caucasus, or the Caribbean. In this respect, we may find literatures within nonstate frameworks, as is the case of Catalan and Walloon; “small” literatures within smaller nations with state frameworks such as Georgian literature; a diasporic third space, in the case of Yiddish; and Indigenous literatures, which may crisscross entire regions (Latin America), more than one country (as with Swahili), or countries with multiple languages, like Canada. In the case of Indigenous literatures, language decolonization encourages the use of specific terminology, or a certain respect for oral narratives. Despite not being included among our case studies, I also seek to raise awareness around the role of translation in multilingual contexts (such as along the Mexican–American border) or in literatures published in the languages of former empires (e.g., as in Equatorial Guinea, where French, Spanish, and Portuguese are used).

Furthermore, this publication seeks to shed light on the role of genre in structuring “minor” literary communities without relying exclusively on the legitimacy of the West, contrasting with approaches that focus exclusively on the origins of the novel in relation to Western literatures, for instance. Rather, we might view the biography in Turkish, the novel in Urdu, or the political novel in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. From this perspective, genre can offer a sort of worldedness (to use Eric Hayot’s terms)⁶⁴ in the sense that genres establish a relationship between the writer’s world and the world outside the text. Genres also travel between “peripheries,” “semi-peripheries,” and “centers.” From a materialist perspective on literature and using a sociological approach, this special issue also aims to provide significant insights related to the structure of the literary and publishing field. Thus, we study the role of academia in the circulation of peripheral literatures, the value of consecration institutions—prizes and book fairs—, national and global governance related to translation policies, and alternative practices in the world translation market, such as the use of digital platforms. Likewise, we underline the role of other media, such as journals, literary magazines, and anthologies. We also highlight the relevance of intermediate languages, as in the case of German for the circulation of Georgian literature, but problematize the role of “central” languages, specifically in the case of Swahili translation flows. Finally, the special issue also stresses the relevance of the cultural mediator, women translators, formal and informal networks and translation practices such as self-translation and indirect translation. The impact of the circulation and reception of the original—from the local/national to the transnational/global literary field—is also considered in light of the readership and multiple audiences of translations.

Within this framework, analyzing “minor” literatures and soft power can cast light on the differences between public and private initiatives in relation to translation driven by governments, cultural relations, academia, or media such as journals. Our case studies offer interesting insights about activities destined for the interior (intranslation and conferences) and activities for the exterior that have an effect upon the source culture. For instance, we could mention the teaching of languages abroad; activities in which the intellectual, writer, or translator takes on the role of national representative for a variety of cultural or scientific events; extranslation; or participation in book fairs and international events. The relationship between “minor” literatures and soft power is at the core of the article by Carbó-Catalan, who focuses her research on the analysis of a political institution, namely, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in the interwar period. She also sheds light on the challenges derived from the lack of a patronage system for “peripheral” languages as a way to explore interperipheral exchange, invisibility, and cultural diplomacy. Specifically, Carbó-Catalan reflects on the case of Catalonia and the lack of clear-cut words to refer to regions (in the twofold sense mentioned above, with examples like Catalonia and Wallonia but also the Caucasus), alluding to the idea of invisibility that Maud Gonne (also in this issue) calls the “lack of perception.” The historical context following the First World War frames the works by Carbó-Catalan and van der Meer; as well as the articles by Gonne and Fólica. Their research shows how the issue of minorities was popularized in the 1920s. Van der Meer refers to the Polish Minority Treaty, while Carbó-Catalan describes this same context as a period that favored Catalan society of the time, considering the general European debate on what constituted a national minority, what rights minorities had, which minorities countries needed to recognize, and so on. Nonetheless, in contrast to the case described by Carbó-Catalan, the interwar period did not favor Yiddish, as van der Meer explains that “the Polish state viewed the treaty as a threat to national sovereignty, and thus the treaty sowed greater resentment toward the minorities it was meant to protect.” Merkle also points out the challenges of adequate reception and highlights the importance of the sociohistorical context and the reception of cultural products. In the case of Indigenous literatures in Canada, Merkle recalls the unfavorable context of the 1980s followed by the improved conditions after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous languages (UNIDIL), which began in 2022. Both of these initiatives have boosted the visibility and legitimacy of Indigenous languages and culture. In this sense, this special issue shows how similar processes and debates around “minorities” have favored or damaged certain “minorities” and not others, both in history and in the present. The relationship between the “minor” and soft power may be observed in terms of support and also through the means by which translated literature is expressed (written text vs. oral transmission). Orality weighs heavily in the texts that Fólica analyzes in her chapter on the Peruvian magazines Amauta and Boletín Titikaka. As Fólica notes, “given that the Indigenous languages at hand are popular languages or variants thereof with long oral traditions but far shorter printed traditions,” a reflection that Gonne shares when it comes to Wallonia. On another note, some of the articles also highlight the challenges of building corpora of translated texts for the languages and literatures being analyzed, as the texts were sometimes not published in book format and instead orally performed. Thus, these articles manifest the fragmentary and nonexhaustive character of research on “minor” literatures that can be characterized by the prevalence of oral transmission. The invisibility of these literatures, in Carbó-Catalan’s words, is such that considering the institutions that organize literary and cultural life in certain languages makes sense, as it is the institutions that wield the ability to visibilize or invisibilize them.

“Minor” can also be interpreted according to the position that a literature occupies in academia or in terms of its relations with the power. In fact, as some articles make manifest (see Carbó-Catalan and Gonne especially), literatures from certain regions have been marginalized from numerous academic disciplines, from global cultural history to transregional studies, to translation studies, whose conceptual frameworks cannot aptly describe “ultraminor” literatures, as Gonne notes. We may also observe some differences between public versus private initiatives, which we cannot exclusively pin on the state versus nonstate dichotomy when considering regional governments such as Catalonia and Wallonia’s or the situation of Yiddish, which lies beyond this dichotomy. Some of the case studies included here contribute to considering “minor” literatures in relation to nation building or even national branding (see Carbó-Catalan, Gonne and Kvirikashvili), as well as the multiple effects that translation can have on the cultural context of origin. On a different note, the article by Bilal questions the role of the “national” in literary history and advocates for the need to overcome and decenter the national focus. In this respect, Bilal proposes genre—rather than the nation—as a more pertinent category to write a decentered literary history. According to Bilal’s understanding, world literature has reinforced the national by projecting modern nations onto periods in which they did not actually exist, distorting our understanding of literary and historical phenomena. Thus, he suggests that we instead focus on the “novel community” as an imagined community within and throughout the novel. We may observe how a particular literary genre, and not a national identity (“Koreanness” or “Pakistaniness”), becomes a source around which people gather. These communities are fluid because genres are unstable. Maud Gonne, for the case of Wallonian, also points out the way cultural and literary representations have crossed borders, enabling emerging cultures to be perceived, both inside and beyond their boundaries, as “imagined communities.”

The intersections between cultural diplomacy and cultural relationships also demonstrate the effects that translation policies have on institutions such as the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (see Carbó-Catalan in this volume), while Merkle mentions the government of Canada and the UNESCO’s cultural policies for the cultural and linguistic revitalization of the country’s Indigenous languages. Carbó-Catalan’s article is especially interesting due to its reflection on self-promotion mechanisms, state-sponsored translations, and translations sponsored by other institutions (for the latter case, see the article by Kvirikashvili, specifically the case of the Open Society Foundation). Stocco’s article complements this perspective with examples of self-created institutions for network building—we might also consider Zugutrawun / Reunión en la Palabra (1994) and Taller de Escritores en Lenguas Indígenas de América (1997). The description of translation policies that Fólica outlines in her chapter on Peruvian magazines, or the place of translation in the case outlined by Talento regarding the Italian journal Plural, which published poems from Hindi, are worth noting, too. In Fólica’s article, translations in literary magazines are analyzed to look at the relationship between the self and the foreign with a special focus on Indigenous languages. This text contributes to thinking about the specificities of publications in magazines. In this sense, this article illustrates the case of bilingual or hybrid publications and studies how these are textually resolved, thus shining light on several kinds of Indigenism. Fólica discusses the notions of “indigenism,” “indoamericanism,” “Andinism,” and “continentalism,” ideas that Fólica interestingly connects with the interactions between the local, the national, and the global through a Latin American perspective.

The mediating role of academia is also analyzed by Talento regarding cases of translation from Swahili within and outside the university framework. Talento also studies a translation published with the support of Litprom—founded as the Society for the Promotion of Literature from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Frankfurt—funded by the German Protestant Church, aid and development agencies, the German government, and the Frankfurt Book Fair, as well as one case of self-publishing. In the English-speaking context, she notices significant differences between English in Europe and English-language translations produced in America and East Africa. They offer a more heterogeneous picture, especially in the light of the multilateral connections that bind writers/translators, publishing houses, and academic projects. Without a doubt, many of the studies collected here show how literary institutions that visibilize, allow, or facilitate circulation emerge. The objects of study include political institutions in the cases studied by Carbó-Catalan and Merkle regarding the United Nations and UNESCO; the university and its interest or lack of it in Swahili and Walloon languages and literatures in Talento and Gonne’s cases; the Index Translationum for Gonne; magazines for Fólica; prizes for Talento; and book fairs for Kvirikashvili.

Another theme emerging in this special issue regarding our aim to decentralize literary and translation history has to do with the agency of individuals in the translation of “minorities” but also with mediators, be they actors, institutions, or networks of mediators. Mediators are also fundamental to the emergence of specific institutions, journals, publishing houses, and the promotion of translation practices such as self-translation or self-edition. The focus on cultural mediators is also shared by Golda van der Meer with respect to the translation of Yiddish poetry, especially that of the remarkable Deborah Vogel, an avant-garde Yiddish poet who decided to self-translate her poems from German and Polish into Yiddish, thus affirming her Jewish cultural identity. Vogel was writing from a “peripheral” city, Lviv, as a woman in the avant-garde, and in a “minor” language, Yiddish. Within a gender perspective, van der Meer deploys Olga Castro’s⁶⁵ understanding of self-translators as cultural and ideological ambassadors. Thus, she interprets Vogel as a two-way ambassador between the Polish culture and the Yiddish one. From a theoretical perspective that aligns with our questioning of the national framework as a way to structure world literature, the use of the term “ambassador” is interesting when representing aesthetics rather than countries (“Vogel, an ambassador of Jewish representation in Lviv”).

The fundamental role of cultural mediators, who can also mediate between aesthetics—not only between nations or cultures—also appears in the work of Denise Merkle. Specifically, Merkle highlights the roles of An Antane Kapesh and José Mailhot (for the Innu language), Tomson Highway and Robert Dickson (for the Cree language), and Kent Montkan, an artist whose “representational narrative art” has been compared to the idea of the “minor” in literature. To Merkle, “indigenous individuals now have recourse to strategies that can range from creating minor visual art forms to writing in their original language after years of self-translation as well as concurrent writing in the maternal and settler languages.” In van der Meer as in Merkle, self-translation is a common theme, though it is more relevant to Deborah Vogel than to the cases described by Merkle, who problematizes the notion of the original and translation in cases of bilingual authors who have published in English first but have in fact stated that they originally wrote their work in an Indigenous language.

Poets and writers as cultural mediators also appear in the article by Fólica with the examples of the poet Gamaliel Churata and the Marxist theorist and politician José Carlos Mariátegui, who was concerned with the issues of national and regional identity. As Fólica points out, the translation of Indigenous literatures is analyzed differently in the two publications where Churata and Mariátegui took part. Although both magazines are considered “indigenist” and even Marxist–publications, they show antagonic approaches in relation to Spanish and Quechua languages.

Elicura Chihuailaf is another example of a cultural mediator for Mapuche literature who sheds light on the expansion and strengthening of interperipheral networks among Indigenous literatures in the American continent. According to Melisa Stocco (in this volume), Chihuailaf played a key role in the development of the idea of oralitura, a crucial conceptual node in the configuration of trans-Indigenous conversations. Chihuailaf was also relevant due to his (self-) translating practice and translation of non-Mapuche texts into Mapudungun, as well as his work as a cultural agent in the organizing of two historical literary events in the 1990s—milestones for the regional networking of Indigenous writers. These case studies underline the importance of multilingualism, bilingualism, and self-translation. Stocco underlines how Indigenous authors have been consistently writing in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in their respective vernacular languages (Quechua, Aymara, Mapudungun, Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mayan, and Wayuu, among others) since the 1960s. In the case of Indigenous languages in Canada (see the chapter by Denise Merkle), we may observe concurrent writing in both maternal and settler languages.

Van der Meer’s article contributes to a reflection on self-translation and makes distinctions as to whether self-translation unfolds from a minor to a major language, or from a major to a minor one. This consideration also appears in Ana Kvirikashvili’s reflections on directionality in this issue. In Van der Meer’s case study, the directionality of self-translation is seen as having significant impacts. Van der Meer underscores that “hardly any studies on self-translation showcase the phenomenon of authors who self-translate their work from a dominant language into a minor or peripheral language.” Van der Meer’s article complicates the relationship between language, nation, and State, making manifest the complexity of the world’s linguistic system and, by extension, the world’s literary system. Further, like other articles of this volume, this research questions national identity by focusing on languages, alone or in clusters, that are transnational and do not always coincide with mapped borders. See, for instance, the case of Urdu as outlined by Bilal, or van der Meer on Yiddish, though some researchers view the latter as a dying language. In this respect, Vogel’s self-translations into Yiddish represent and discuss contemporary translation sites and, by doing so, challenge the notions of national and cultural identity.

The articles in this special issue are also different and fluctuate from research focusing more on aesthetics (Bilal, Hashimoto, or even Fólica in her focus on the textual analysis of translations in Peruvian magazines) to research focusing more on sociological aspects. Thus, with a materialist approach to literary circulation, Melisa Stocco considers the impact of prizes and kinds of editions (self-editions, government-funded series, small, regional publications). From this perspective, we may consider the structure and possibilities of the editorial field with respect to other media, translation grant programs, the role of universities and academia, and the potential of digital platforms. For the academic world, Serena Talento depicts the mediating role of the Italian Elena Bertoncini Zúbková, translator from the Swahili and university professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” and Enrico D’Angelo, a poet, translator, writer, and editor for the Periferia rivista quadrimestrale di cultura and the journal Plural: rivista di poesia e letteratura italiana e straniera. For the English-speaking context, Talento also stresses the role of self-founded publishing houses and self-translation in East Africa, as practiced by Ebrahim Hussein and Gabriel Ruhumbika.

In relation to their audiences, “minor” literatures experience important challenges in order to reach readers and spark their interest. As Talento claims, “there were no expectations of the market because there was no market to speak of.” Gonne and Merkle also point out the problematic relationships between the different “peripheries” in a single territory. In Belgium, Walloon is often pitted against Flemish and German; in Canada, French is seen as a “peripheral” language compared to English, which is spoken by the majority. French is also taken differently when spoken in the Quebec variety, compared to France’s, as is French from nonfrancophone zones. Such relationships also mark Indigenous languages. The article that Gonne has dedicated to Walloon literature emphasizes interperipheral relations within regional movement to explain that “not only did they enter into a ‘vertical’ dialogue (i.e., in relation to and mediated by the dominant national culture), but they also opened a ‘horizontal’ dialogue (in relation to and mediated by other dominated cultures).”

Our case studies also reconsider the opposition between the source-and-target language. This is the case of the articles by Kvirikashvili, Stocco, and Talento, the latter of whom shows how “translations undertaken into English in the East African context provide us with a case in which translation does not imply a distinction between source and target culture/context.” Similarly, Kvirikashvili’s article also problematizes the theoretical work centering exclusively on interperipheral contacts that pass through a given set of “centers.” In this sense, she unveils translation flows between peripheries without mediation from a “center” and highlights the relevance of internal translations in Georgian literature as well as in the context of the changes that emerged after Georgia’s independence in the early 1990s. Regarding more recent times, Kvirikashvili highlights how the Frankfurt Fair acted as a consecrating institution for the circulation of Georgian literature, especially when Georgia was invited to the fair as guest of honor in 2018. As in other cases, this article challenges the original-translation binomial and notes that the Georgian book lists would seem to consider certain books Georgian literature despite their original language being non-Georgian, raising the issue of what Georgian literature is and of what is a translation (when an English original is seen as a “translation” of Georgian culture).

On a different level, the article by Bilal also outlines a “novel community” of Urdu writers, readers, and listeners who emerged during the late nineteenth century in the Hindustan of colonial India. In relation to the audience and the readers, he calls into question the peripheral character of Urdu in novel communities. The community that emerges in and through Nazir Ahmad’s works is “a novel community of Urdu speaking ashrāf whose organizing principle is the preservation of sharaf, a crucial aspect of this community that a national teleological framework fails to take into account.” Such genre communities thus provide a richer appreciation of audiences and readers, showing how communities gather around literary genres—creating a literary history that is not based on national borders. Likewise, the article by Satoru Hashimoto explicitly promotes transregional comparative approaches engaging with multiple non-Western languages and literatures from East Asia. He proposes rethinking the relationship between world literature and interperipheral exchange and brilliantly analyzes a Japanese work translated into Chinese and from Chinese into Korean. In this respect, he proposes a multilayered structure of world literature in which “centers” and “peripheries” are intertwined with interperipheral exchanges informed by the legacies of regional literary tradition and, in the end, by the specificities of their audiences and readers. As Bilal and Elgül show for Urdu and Turkish languages and literatures, Hashimoto also pays close attention to genre in interperipheral circulation by showing the relationships between literature and history. With a focus on narratological analysis, Hashimoto’s article shows that the author (Ryūkei) adopted a form of traditional Japanese vernacular fiction (Yomihon) to represent democracy, thus legitimizing democracy without ideologically relying on Western civilization. The transnational provenance of the narrative form was what enabled Ryūkei’s allegorization to be rendered in Chinese and Korean.

Meanwhile, Ceyda Elgül’s article offers a definition for literary collections and studies modern and traditional collections in Turkey. This case study interrogates the content of collections that embrace, and sometimes blend, individuals from “minor” and “major” regions of the world. On a different note, it also explores whether, in such series, translation appears as a “minor” activity that remains an invisible form of textual production. The article by Elgül is framed in the historical context of the alphabet reformation in 1928 and strongly contributes to the analysis of intralingual translation as a major constituent of the Turkish literary repertoire, as some of the works that initially appeared in scripts during the Ottoman era were later conveyed in the Latin alphabet, therefore reaching a modern audience that lacked access to the original scripts.

The circulation of Walloon literary in- and extranslations from 1870 to 1940 also underscores the importance of researching translation flows on a larger scale. In this sense, Gonne hones in on the cultural mediators, journals, and events promoting such translations, as well as on intralingual translations between Wallonian variants (i.e., Walloon and Occitan). Gonne’s article also raises significant issues from a theoretical point of view. She delves into the notion of “less-translated” and stresses that, in fact, the “less-translated” dimension of languages does not address the relative number or frequency of in- and extranslations, but contrasts, in absolute numbers, with “more-translated languages,” such as English. As said above, what we are still missing is a relational view on translation flows for minority languages. In this respect, the article investigates the in- and extranslations flows of a so-called “less-translated language” in an “ultraminor” context (Wallonia). As Gonne points out, “just as the concept of ‘minority,’ ‘less translated’ should be the expression of a relation, not an essence, and relate not only to ‘more translated’ but also to ‘less and more translating’ languages.” This dynamic perspective, which highlights the intertwinement of language asymmetry and translation directionality, would allow for the possibility of measuring the balance of translation flows while mapping the complexity of vertical and horizontal relationships. Gonne’s article also observes how in- and extranslations, as well as a large number of intralingual translations, blur the distinction between these binaries. According to these results, the opposition between “target-language intensive” and “source-language intensive languages” seems rather unhelpful in gauging the organization of “ultraminor” spaces.

Along these lines, Kvirikashvili’s article briefly discusses relevant terms to our special issue such as the transnational literary space, global literary space, world republic of letters, or world system of translations. Kvirikashvili also discusses the terms of “small” and “less-translated” and underlines that we should be aware that, as we have already seen, a language can be “less translated” and simultaneously dominant toward its “minority” others. Meanwhile, we also need to acknowledge that these categories are not only relative but dynamic, as they cannot be understood as fixed, but as evolving in time. She also points out to the sense of directionality as a factor that inevitably modifies and adds nuance to certain theories on how translation practices develop around these literatures. The article by van der Meer also distinguishes between the “minor” and the “peripheral.” She recalls the work by Chana Kronfeld,⁶⁶ who argues that, due to Western critics’ excessive focus on “major” languages, “minor” literatures have been straightjacketed into being conceived as literatures written by “minorities” in a “major” language, which would ultimately exclude literatures written by majority-culture speakers of “minor” languages like Hebrew and Yiddish. Van der Meer also calls attention to Lionnet and Shih’s reiteration of what Kronfeld had already when discussing Deleuze and Guattari, namely, that more often than not, “minority” subjects view themselves in opposition to dominant discourse rather than in contrast to each other or to other “minority” groups.

In short, by considering interactions between different agents and locations beyond the framework of the nation, to include different scales and units of analysis, we may adumbrate the transnational space of the “global minor.” The term aims at studying the various meanings of the “minor,” as well as their representations, reinterpretations, and appropriations. As I have previously pointed out, the “global minor” draws from many theories of globalization, literature seeking deterritorialization, and other interdisciplinary approaches for sociolinguistics, migration studies, anthropology, gender studies, and computer science. By combining macro and textual approaches, as well as methodological strategies like interviews to analyze translation practices, the “global minor” includes the analysis of representations of the “minor” in literary texts, but also emphasizes connections and translation flows in terms of circulation and reception.

Notes