Enacting Internationalism from Below: Post-WWII Periodicals for Literature in Translation as Grassroots Internationalism

• In Event: Provincializing Internationalism: Periodicals, Publishers and Practices II: Performing

Abstract

Although socialist states in the second half of the 20th century were embedded in a set of political, military, and cultural international organizations, the days of cultural internationalism as an explicitly pronounced project were largely thought of as belonging to the past. Based on examples from the USSR and Czechoslovakia, this paper proposes an alternative model of internationalism, one that is based on organizing and practice, the performance of editorial labor, from the bottom up. Through the analysis of archival materials, the paper reveals how authors, translators, and editors harnessed the mechanisms of cultural institutions to enact their own kind of internationalism, creating their own kinds of visions of a political culture that could even compete with their governments' respective agendas.

Author

• Philip Tuxbury-Gleissner, Ohio State U