Cultural studies and the American perception

While reading Franco’s Cultural Studies, I was frustrated by this outward “tug-a-war” between scholars as how to categorize this area of research. However, I must admit that in the era of globalization, it is perhaps the most critical discipline of study in literature today. Particularly, this essay brought my attention to my own research proposal, in which I hope to focus on the act of linguistic translation with that of cultural translation. In my own studies, I have found that language not only shapes but also narrows the way we view the world, and I would like to challenge theories of post-national and of globalization, which describe a changed world, by noting that these changes have not yet altered the older categories and concepts of ordering and making sense of the world.
Recently, I read that fewer than three percent of literary books published each year in the United States are translated from foreign languages, compared with vastly higher percentages (25-45 percent) in virtually every other country. And much of our three percent consists of retranslating of classics, so the real number for new foreign voices is really quite a bit lower. Franco notes that “there are strong arguments for a field that is avowedly political in its confrontation with the rapidly changing conditions of modern life” (222). But in essence, isn’t all good art political? Franco just threw out the word ‘politics,’ and made it sound like it is unpatriotic. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not simply the narrative or the story – it’s the language and the structure and the meaning behind it. We focus virtually all of our political and military attention on the Middle East, but how many of us could claim to have read a single work of Arabic literature in translation? For a citizen, it’s scary to contemplate a future in which relations with those we need to relate to are diplomatic, and not humane. It’s with art, after all, that a culture best expresses its humanity. While reading Franco’s cultural studies, I couldn’t help but think that this is a terrible time to be an American reader –it makes me think of all the books in the world I’ll never read that would have changed my life.