First text of April, under this month topic: Minority English: The Politics & Culture of a Global Language.
Resident Editor: John Holten
@broken_dimanche
Today: English As Arbiter: The Weight of the Center
Vincenzo Latronico
@v.latronico in conversation with John Holten
In this conversation, they discuss what does it mean to write from the “periphery” today—when circulation depends less on geography than on language?
Starting from Perfection, Latronico reflects on a paradox: while anglophone literature may have lost some of its cultural centrality, English-language publishing continues to function as a decisive filter—an arbiter through which texts travel, gain legitimacy, and become legible across contexts.Translation, then, is not auxiliary but structural. Not simply a bridge, but a condition of possibility. A Slovenian writer reaches Italy via London; proximities are rerouted through the center. Peripheries, as Latronico suggests, may in fact be closer to each other than the infrastructures that connect them.
Against a national framing of literature, this conversation sketches a more unstable cartography: one in which literary citizenship adheres to language, even as language remains entangled with asymmetries of power, circulation, and historical weight.
At a moment when English consolidates its role not as origin but as mediator, the question is no longer who occupies the center, but how it is continuously reproduced.
🔗 Read the full article on our website → A*Desk Critical Thinking → Magazine section → Link in bio.
Available in English, Spanish, and Catalan
The conversation continues next week in Part 2: The Translator’s Authority
Image
@jay.anyways
#AdeskMagazine #CriticalThinking #EnglishasGlobalLanguage #Translation #Literature
