Traces 5: Universities in Translation: The Mental Labour of Globalization

Statement of Purpose

Traces T R A C E S : 5 v sTaTemenT oF PurPose Traces, a multilingual book series of cultural theory and translation, calls for comparative cultural theory that is attentive to global traces in the theoretical knowledge produced in specific locations and that explores how theories are themselves constituted in, and transformed by, practical social relations at diverse sites. We eagerly seek theory produced in disparate sites, including that critical work that has often emerged in a hybrid relation to North American or West European “theory” as a result of the colonialism and quasi-colonialism of the past few centuries. We will publish research, exchanges, and commentaries that address a multilingual audience concerned with all the established disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, in addition to such cross-disciplinary fields as cultural studies, feminist and queer studies, critical race theory, or post-colonial studies. At the same time, Traces aims to initiate a different circulation of intellectual conversation and debate in the world, a different geopolitical economy of theory and empirical data, and a different idea of theory itself. Editions of Traces are published in Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. Each contributor is expected to be fully aware that she or he is writing for and addressing a heterogeneous and multilingual audience: in the manner of a local intellectual under a colonial regime, every contributor is expected to speak with a forked tongue. Traces is an international series. Yet the international space that it generates and sustains, and to which contributors as well as readers are invited, is fundamentally different from that of an internationalism based on one major language’s subjugation of other minor languages. Indeed, it is hoped that the social space in which we argue and converse will challenge the space of the nation and national language. Constituted in processes of translation, among multiple languages and registers, this social space is actualized in our exchanges and debates, and in debates among authors, commentators, translators, and readers. ...