As I sit at my computer, a steady flow of ships sails past my window, arriving at and leaving Hong Kong, the world’s busiest container port. Manufactured goods stream out from here to all corners of the earth. So, as I sit at home, I see globalization manifest.
My colleagues and I here are in scholarly publishing, however, not in manufacturing; we’re trying to focus not on globalization, but on globalism. That’s a distinction, I fear, that too many scholarly publishers in the United States, where I formerly worked at the University of Michigan Press, have still to make. If we are ever to have a genuinely global exchange of ideas, we must focus on globalism.
Scholarly publishers, of course, play their part in the phenomenon of globalization, by which I mean the increasing dispersal of manufacturing and the growth of world trade in manufactured goods. Books are manufactured goods, and scholarly publishers on occasion choose to typeset, print, and bind their books outside the United States. Those who publish books in color do so most frequently, often placing orders with Hong Kong printers, who then ship the books back to North America. In fact, however, the books are rarely actually printed in Hong Kong. That is nearly always done over the border in China, or what I now have learned to refer to as the “mainland.” The front offices are all that remain in the high-wage economy of Hong Kong. Such increased and increasing difficulty in tracing who is actually doing the work is one little-noticed but important aspect of the globalization process.
Once the books are produced, American publishers may say that they market their books worldwide, but realistically, most of the markets they reach are to be found in the other developed countries. North American presses sell to Europe, Japan, the rest of Australasia, and to a few other countries with high enough levels of purchasing power to buy books bearing American prices.
“Co-publishing” is still another component of the foreign-trade picture. In this process, a single printing of a book is done in one country, but some copies are made bearing a different imprint. Those copies are then shipped in bulk to the co-publisher in another country, who has an exclusive right to sell the book in its territory. North American books usually go to Britain and, occasionally, to Australia. (More frequently -- the British are so much better at selling than buying in this area -- the process brings books to North America.) Note that such titles seem, on casual inspection, to originate with the co-publisher and thus do not appear to be imports.
If, by globalization, we mean the physical flow of goods, then those are the means by which scholarly publishers participate in the grand process.
There are, of course, other ways that North American scholarly publishers reach out to make international connections. In particular, they acquire manuscripts from scholars in other countries, although, again, much of the flow is between developed countries, predominantly Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States. Then there are translations into English, but it is hard enough to arrange those even from major European languages, so the number from other languages -- Japanese and Chinese perhaps excepted -- is utterly minuscule. In the other direction, there are a modest number of translations from English into a more heterodox range of languages. However, very few publishers would claim that translations in either direction affect a significant part of their lists. In the case of both manuscripts from other countries and translations, therefore, we’re looking at phenomena that are hardly detectable in the overall flow of scholarly publishing in the developed world.
Nevertheless, to think about the acquisition of foreign manuscripts and about translations is to shift our attention from the physical flow of goods to the transfer of ideas. This is to move from globalization to globalism: from physical exchange to intellectual exchange. Encouraging the latter is -- or should be -- the focus of scholarly presses. After all, their mission is to disseminate scholarship and ideas. Globalism is about fulfilling a broader conception of that mission.
Presses, of course, have to deal with the business side of publishing. So they have to attend to the physical transfer of goods that globalization encompasses. But those considerations, however important financially, should take second place to the nurturing of international intellectual exchange.
What is characteristic of the international activities that today’s academic publishers undertake? They all involve flows between what scholars have called the Center and the Periphery, or within the Center -- between the West and the Rest, or within the West. And, with two exceptions, one uninteresting but the other important, the flow is from the Center to the Periphery: The messages are being sent from the West to the Rest.
One exception is the flow of finished books from such places as Hong Kong. I do not see that as raising any issues for the discussion of globalism. It is purely a phenomenon of physical trade -- of globalization. The other is the acquisition of manuscripts from authors in the Periphery. The numbers are small and should be larger, but they give promise of a broader sharing of concepts. Or do they?
What is the typical process? Look at what happens at American university presses. The manuscript arrives and is evaluated by an American editor and, nearly certainly, by American reviewers applying American perspectives. Its sales potential in the American market will be a major factor in determining whether or not it will get published. If the author is referring to non-American phenomena, he or she will be asked to provide additional explanation, so the American reader will be able to grasp the points being made. In brief, a manuscript from the Periphery will be put through a rigorous American and Americanizing filter.
Chen Kwan-hsing, a noted Taiwanese academic, has complained: “When the international academic publishing industry is increasingly market-oriented towards the ‘U.S.’ readership (because ‘that is where the biggest market is’), it is increasingly difficult to deal with the question of context; for contextualizing can always mean that critical work is for them (the U.S. readership). ... [W]orks written outside the U.S. are always asked to contextualize when addressing ‘local issues,’ or even to analyze issues within a language or framework which American academics are familiar with.”
One response would be for American publishers to shrug their shoulders and say that they really cannot ignore the financial constraints that force such contextualization, the pressures that force them to use an American filter in their decision making. They might also shrug and say that scholars are always going to value a reputation in the United States, because they aspire, if not to permanent positions, at least to regular invitations to visiting positions there.
If one is thinking just as a publisher, such responses are explicable and reasonable. However, for university presses, with their higher mission, shrugs are not good enough. That, says Chen, is a way of “reproducing the existing power structure of global capitalism and the political nation-states.” Or, to simplify: To shrug is to accept and reinforce the hegemony of American ideas. I lay that down as a challenge to those university presses that would prefer to respond and not just to shrug. The challenge is to work around the operational constraints that demand the use of an American filter.
The question then becomes: How can flows within the Periphery be encouraged, and how can unfiltered ideas be sent from the Periphery to the Center? Indeed, how can the metaphor of the Center and the Periphery be broken down and a situation created that can better be described as a web of interconnected and equally privileged, or rather nonprivileged, nodes? Or, to put it another way: How can Anglo-American work be provincialized? The answer has two dimensions: the publishing infrastructure within countries, and the mechanism for the flow of texts among countries.
Clearly, even if an easy and unprivileged flow of manuscripts or books among countries could be achieved, nothing fundamentally would be changed if the destination country lacked the mechanisms actually to get the works to the readers. People who have been fortunate enough to visit publishers in developing countries have been made very aware of how many things that publishers working in rich countries take for granted. Presses in less-favored nations may have to work without a pool of publishing skills, without easily available printing capacity, without mechanisms for distributing books, without bookstores, even without a reliable postal system. And, of course, there are the egregious limitations that American publishers don’t face -- like censorship, both direct and subtle.
In Azerbaijan, for example, where I have served as a consultant several times, there is one main printer, government-owned. Clearly, anything too critical of the government might find the publisher’s capacity fully booked or paper temporarily in limited supply. It is not impossible to sell books in the capital, Baku, although bookstores are hardly common or good when found, and most appear to be controlled by state entities. But there truly is no mechanism for shipping a load of books elsewhere in the country -- literally no distribution system for books, or anything much else. Such problems are multiplied many, many times throughout the world.
It is easy to take for granted a healthy publishing sector. It is only when confronted with a situation like that in Azerbaijan that one begins to appreciate how important free, independent, and creative book publishers are for the development and maintenance of a vigorous democratic society, for a flourishing literary culture, and for the essential discussion of serious ideas. While the need for free newspapers and magazines is widely appreciated, their main role is an immediate one, whereas books provide the channel for the serious, thorough exploration of ideas that is essential for slowly building a truly strong and mature free society.
That means that any effort to redress the dominance of the Center should also be designed to nurture the publishing houses and the publishing infrastructures of the Periphery. Bringing in multinational publishers would be exactly the wrong way to help individual countries build or strengthen their indigenous presses. Consider what has happened in Africa. As the Danish scholar Robert Phillipson comments in his book Linguistic Imperialism: “The parlous state of publishing in Africa is a direct consequence of the relative dominance of British publishing in Africa.” Policies must be designed to nurture independence, not dependence.
Now, consider the other part of the big picture -- enabling the flow of manuscripts and books within the Periphery, among countries that are outside the core. In the bad old days, there was only one basic choice: to put books on a ship or perhaps on a plane. Now we have welcome alternatives to the physical movement of books. Welcome, because physically transporting books is slow -- a hindrance if the objective is to expedite the exchange of ideas and enable transnational debate; because moving books internationally is costly; and because doing so imposes one standard of production quality -- and thus approximately the same purchase price -- on everyone, rich or poor.
Here the Internet lurches onto stage, playing its familiar and well-practiced role as panacea. A manuscript can be sent digitally to another publishing house in another country. Then the recipient can, with its local knowledge, determine the best mode of production and the best means of distribution and promotion within its country or perhaps its region. To be sure, there are business and cost issues that would need sorting out before that rough vision could become a practical reality. But it would increase the supply of projects available to nascent publishing houses struggling against the weakness of their country’s infrastructure, and at the same time put decision making in the hands of local publishing houses that know their readers, the needs of those readers, and the best way to get books to them.
Even if we can change the structure of the flow of ideas and eliminate the dominance of the Center, we are still faced with the problem of language and still face either the complexities of many translations or the imposition of a single language. I am afraid I cannot see any solution, aside from the fantasy of good automatic translation, that does not leave us with the hegemony of English, perhaps challenged by Chinese or Spanish. The complexity of the problem is shown when one considers that, in truth, the issue is no longer even just whether English should be given a privileged place in worldwide publishing. We now have a host of Englishes, spoken and written differently around the globe. Should we put them through the filtering and homogenizing process of Anglo-American publishers?
The challenge is more than just one of translation. The challenge is to become inclusive, to accept different viewpoints, different contexts, and different forms of expression. That is not an easy task; we are all more comfortable reading in familiar language about familiar things. Yet at least some of us, when we travel, forgo the safe cocoon of the tour group and the package that wraps us in the familiar and the reassuring. We take our backpacks and travel independently. Should we not also be independent travelers intellectually? Should we not struggle, with relish, with languages, assumptions, and contexts? And should not serious scholarly publishers aid that adventurousness, leading treks, not package tours, bringing us unfiltered the work of scholars from abroad? The objective, however, is even greater: It is to create a global web of equality -- equality of intellectual exchange and equality of intellectual engagement.
Last January, at the University of Hong Kong, we had a small conference at which scholars came from nearly all the countries of the crescent that stretches from Pakistan to South Korea: Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. The topic was the teaching of American literature in Asia. The caliber of the participants was exceptional, and they had much to contribute. I say that not to be patronizing, but to lament the fact that, because of the impediments of the present system, to a large extent the only role that such scholars can play in worldwide scholarly debates is as readers. And they can only do that with great difficulty. To thus limit their role is to deprive scholarly debates of the participation of lively, original minds actively contributing ideas, not just receiving them. And minds that bring truly new perspectives.
Colin Day is publisher of Hong Kong University Press.
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