Translation and Epistemic Justice: Introduction

Abstract

This essay introduces a collection of essays first presented as papers at the 2024 ACLA vice presidential seminar, “Translation and Epistemic Justice in a Comparative Literature Context.” The seminar invited participants to reflect on how translation both perpetuates and contests global inequities of access, circulation, and knowledge production. Drawing on her own experience navigating US, Greek, and Cypriot academic environments, Karen Emmerich frames translation as a fraught but indispensable practice for resisting Anglodominance in North American scholarship. Contributors interrogate the complicity of translation in imperial and colonial histories while also exploring its potential to widen the circle of scholarly exchange by amplifying Global South voices, resisting monolingualization, and fostering collaborative, plurilingual research practices. Against the backdrop of current material and epistemic injustices, particularly in Palestine, the essays highlight translation’s capacity to support solidarities across languages and geographies. They also stress the structural barriers—from academic publishing norms to institutional inertia—that hinder such efforts. The collection positions translation as a practice of both critique and repair: a means of unsettling disciplinary assumptions, expanding comparative methodologies, and advocating for a more just global circulation of ideas.