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

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article has four specific goals: (1) to briefly historicize which theories, approaches, and methodologies have been more productive to the discussion of the notions of the “minor,” “minoritized,” “ultraminor,” “small,” “less-translated,” and “peripheral,” 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 mediators; and (4) to present 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 space through different translation practices. The article 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.