Theory in the World

Despite the flurry of interest in translation studies, markedly less emphasis has  been placed on the process of translating theoretical texts, especially those originating outside of Europe and the U.S. This series breaks new ground by translating book-length theoretical works and taking up the issue of the doubly marginalized text. Theory in the World asks a scandalous question: is “theory” different when produced in the postcolonial world? Has globalization changed the picture? Has localization, touching on transnational gender roles, embodiment, non-Western poetics, reading practice, and canon-formation survived? Finally, it asks how the classical questions of translation studies become altered in this previously ignored geopolitical context and looks at the ways literature and the pedagogy of the humanities take account of these alterations.  

Series Editors:  

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and holds honorary degrees from University of Toronto, University of London, and Oberlin College. She is the author of In Other Worlds (1987), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993); Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet (1997), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2007), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming). She has translated Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida (1976); Imaginary Maps (1993), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda (2002), by Mahasweta Devi; Song for Kali, by Ramproshad Sen (2000); and A Season in the Congo, by Aimé Césaire (2010).  

Hosam Aboul-Ela is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. He is the translator of Stealth, by Sonallah Ibrahim (2010), Distant Train, by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid (2007), and Voices, by Soleiman Fayyad (1993), and the author of numerous articles in the areas of literature of the Americas and Latin American and Arab cultural studies. His book, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, was published in 2007.