Call for papers: Translation and the Cultural Cold War

Scholars of the Cultural Cold War continue to explore cultural production and reception, ranging from high culture to everyday experiences, exploring the role and politics of print, propaganda, and culture mainly in the US and Europe (e.g. Hixson 1997; Berghahn 2001; Barnhisel and Turner 2010; Barnhisel 2014). Cultural interactions across the Iron Curtain divide have also been explored (Romijn et. al. 2012; Vowinckel et.al. 2012; Mikkonen and Koivunen 2015). Yet these studies rarely take into account the field of translation and its significance for determining how ideas and intellectual output actually enters another culture. Much of this research to date has concentrated on East-West exchanges and the relevance of (often covert) translation for the dissemination of ideas to bypass censorship (Finn and Couvée 2014). The various roles performed by translators, editors, and publishers during the Cold War were therefore crucial, both for disseminating the cultural and intellectual output of the colonial powers and superpowers, and (from a more positive and as yet less acknowledged perspective) for the development of indigenous publishing in the non-aligned countries, i.e. those which were indirectly implicated in the Cold War (Rubin 2014; Scott-Smith and Lerg 2017).

Scholars of Translation Studies have also explored the politics and ideology of translation (Calzada Perez 2002; Merkel 2010), but they have largely focused on censorship and its strong, rather subversive impact on the field of cultural production in the former Eastern bloc, Spain, Italy, and Portugal, among others (TTR 2002; Billiania 2007; Ní Chuilleanáin et al. 2009). The field has hardly explored the role and impact of the Cultural Cold War on the professionalization of translation, the development of a publishing industry in the developing countries, or the formation / transformation of the broader field of cultural production in each context.

There is an opportunity to combine the interests of the Cultural Cold War and Translation Studies in order to investigate in more detail the theory and practice of translation for cultural/intellectual dissemination beyond the transatlantic region. On the one hand, scholarship on the Cultural Cold War can bring important insights on the cultural diplomacies of the Western and Eastern powers, and how translation was recognized as an essential part of the ‘science’ of propaganda and cultural relations. On the other hand, Translation Studies’ sustained interest in the sociology of translation, and in particular, the “agent-grounded research” path (Buzelin 2010: 8; Milton and Bandia 2009) can offer new perspectives on the worldview and cultural assumptions and practices of actors in the Cultural Cold War. By using Bourdieu’s Field of Cultural Production as the basic framework for analyzing cultural transfer through translation, this special issue will collect a set of studies that emphasize the cross-cultural importance of translation for the global spread of ideas and cultural values during the Cold War.

Deadline for submissions: 1 January 2018

For full details, visit http://www.atisa.org/call-for-papers-coldwar