A Critique of Provincial Reason: Situated Cosmopolitanisms and the Infrastructures of Theoretical Translation

This essay addresses both the productive influence of translation in a tradition of thought, and the gaps and limits that result from the absence of translation. The essay first challenges Franco Moretti’s proposal of “distant reading” and his call to rely on national critics, through a discussion of the limits of the criticism actually available in translation that might sustain such a methodology. This limit is illustrated through the belated translation of two major books of Latin American literary criticism, by Ángel Rama and Antonio Cornejo Polar. The second section discusses the translation of German philosophical and critical works in midcentury Mexico, to illustrate how the construction of an infrastructure of philosophy translation empowered a new generation of thinkers, the Mexican existentialists. The essay concludes with a call for reciprocity in the translation of criticism.