Working Within the Map

There is a word that publishing professionals use constantly and almost never examine: peripheral. Peripheral literatures, peripheral markets, peripheral languages. The term does useful work in conversation, since everyone seems to know what it means, and precisely for this reason it deserves suspicion. Because the moment you ask what makes a literature peripheral, the answer turns out to depend entirely on where you are standing, and on who built the map.

THE MAP AND ITS MAKERS

The conventional map of literary circulation has a recognisable shape. At its centre sit a handful of languages and cities: English above all, with Paris, London and New York operating as clearing houses of consecration. Translation flows confirm the geometry. The large majority of translated books worldwide are translated from English, while English-language markets famously translate very little into their own language. A book written in Maltese, Sardinian, Catalan or Arabic that aspires to international circulation must, in most cases, pass through one of these gates. The gatekeepers decide not only what crosses but what the crossing costs: which themes are legible, which voices are “representative”, which forms of difference are marketable and which are merely difficult.

This is the geometry that the word peripheral describes, and it is real. To pretend otherwise, to imagine a flat world of literatures circulating freely on merit, is blindness to how the trade actually works.

The disagreement begins when we ask what to do with the word.

THE CASE FOR REFUSING THE TERM

One position holds that the category itself is the problem. To call a literature peripheral is to accept the hierarchy that produced the term, to internalise a geography drawn by others. The objection is not cosmetic. Categories shape behaviour: a publisher who thinks of a literature as peripheral approaches it as a niche, prices it as a risk, markets it as an exotic supplement to a centre that remains the implicit norm. The literature is read as peripheral before it is read at all.

The clearest articulation of this refusal in the European context came in 2007, when more than forty writers published the manifesto Pour une littérature-monde in Le Monde. Their target was the label “francophone literature”, a category that gathered writers from Algeria, Lebanon, Senegal, Haiti and elsewhere into a waiting room adjacent to French literature proper, fluent in the language but never quite admitted to the house. The manifesto argued that the centre-periphery distinction within a single language was a colonial residue dressed as a bibliographic convenience. Writers who had won France’s major prizes were still being shelved, reviewed and funded as guests.

The same logic animates older and broader critiques. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision to abandon English for Gikuyu was, among other things, a refusal to accept that literary existence required validation in the coloniser’s language: a rejection of the entire circuit that made the label seem natural. From this perspective, the work is to dismantle the axis along which movement from periphery to centre is measured, not to complete the journey.

The position is clear-eyed about power. Its limit is practical. Refusing the map does not make the map disappear. Rights are still bought in Frankfurt and London. Translation funding still flows through national and supranational institutions that think in terms of source and target markets. A literature can decline the category and still be treated according to it.

THE CASE FOR CLAIMING THE TERRITORY

The second position accepts the terrain in order to move on it. Here the periphery becomes a position with its own resources: specificity, density, the kind of cultural particularity that a centre, by definition, cannot have. The question shifts from how do we stop being peripheral to what can be done from here that cannot be done from anywhere else.

This is a strategy rather than a resignation, and there are literatures that have pursued it with institutional seriousness. Catalan literature is the most developed case in the Mediterranean. A literature in a language without a state built an export infrastructure, the Institut Ramon Llull, a coordinated presence at international fairs, a translation grant system, that routes its international circulation around Madrid rather than through it. The guest-of-honour appearance at Frankfurt in 2007 was the visible result of a deliberate institutional construction: Catalan literature presenting itself to the international market as itself, not as a regional subset of Spanish publishing. One can debate the outcomes, but the model is unambiguous. The periphery here does not petition the centre for admission; it builds its own gate.

At a smaller scale, and with fewer resources, similar logics operate elsewhere. Sardinian contemporary writing increasingly works from its territorial specificity rather than despite it, treating the island’s linguistic stratification and historical density as material rather than as a provincial limitation to be written away. Maltese independent publishing offers perhaps the starkest version: a market so small that no economy of scale is available, where publishers operate at micro-scale as a structural condition. What is notable is that some of them have stopped treating this as a deficiency. Small scale permits editorial choices, bilingual editions, hybrid forms, craft production, that larger markets cannot sustain commercially. In these cases the periphery is where certain kinds of literature become possible at all, rather than where literature waits to be discovered.

This position converts a structural condition into agency, and its limit is the mirror of the first one’s. Claiming the periphery can shade into celebrating it, and celebration can become a comfortable enclosure. A literature that markets its own marginality has not escaped the centre’s gaze; it has learned to perform for it.

WHAT TRANSLATION HAS TO DO WITH IT

These two positions are usually discussed as matters of identity and cultural politics. But they have direct, practical consequences for the work of translation and rights exchange, which is where publishers actually encounter the problem.

If you hold the first position, translation is a site of risk: every act of translation into a central language threatens to reformat the work according to the centre’s expectations. The editorial questions become defensive ones. What gets smoothed out? Which footnotes get added, which strangeness gets domesticated, which “universal themes” get foregrounded in the jacket copy at the expense of what the book actually is? The translator and the acquiring editor become, willingly or not, agents of the very geometry the work might resist.

If you hold the second position, translation is a site of projection: the instrument through which a specific literary territory makes itself legible abroad on terms it has had some hand in setting. The questions become strategic. Which works travel first and frame the rest? Which institutional supports, grants, residencies, sample translations, shift the negotiating position of a small literature’s agents and publishers? Who moderates the encounter between a micro-market and the international trade, and in whose interest?

In practice, every working publisher of a small or minoritised literature holds both positions at once, in unstable proportions. The same editor who resents the exoticising frame applied to her catalogue will use that frame, knowingly, to close a deal that funds the next three books. This is what operating inside an asymmetry looks like, and calling it hypocrisy misses the point.

AGAINST RESOLUTION

It would be tidy to end by adjudicating, to say that the refusers are right about language and the claimers are right about practice, and that wisdom lies in some midpoint. The midpoint does not exist. The two positions rest on different theories of how cultural hierarchies change: one believes they change when their categories lose legitimacy, the other believes they change when their territories accumulate enough infrastructure to act. Both have evidence. Neither has proof.

What can be said is this. The word peripheral is not innocent, and neither is the gesture of discarding it. A publishing culture serious about the Mediterranean, a sea that has never had a single centre but only a rotating cast of cities that mistook their moment for geography, cannot afford to use the term unexamined, and cannot afford to pretend the hierarchies it names are absent. The honest position is uncomfortable: to work within the map while refusing to believe in it. That discomfort is where the work is done.