In early June, the Barricade editorial collective sat down together to look back — at our founding principles, the context in which the project began, and the work we had in mind to do — in order to take stock of the present and the work we feel is still to be done. The “autointerview” format we borrowed from the artist Lucas Samaras as a way of articulating, interrogating, updating, and affirming the frame we set for our project and ourselves. We are sharing this experiment here, with the intention of showing to our readers our own seams and outlines.
The Barricade editorial collective includes: Amy Obermeyer, Elizabeth Benninger, Grace Holleran, Jessie Fredlund, Lauren K. Wolfe, and Zach Rivers.
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Barricade mission statement:
Barricade is a platform for the publication of writing against fascism and authoritarianism and other forms of domination and control.
We believe that power functions in part by controlling the movement of information.
We seek to keep information moving by re-presenting it in translation.
We believe that power functions in part by establishing the illusion of transparency.
We believe that literature and its translation obstruct that illusion.
A barricade is a makeshift form of opposition.
A barricade shows its seams and outlines.
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Question, for the founding editors: Looking at the mission statement above, written in January 2017, how would you describe the project’s original motivation?
Amy: The whole idea, at least for me, was making it possible for people with different linguistic capabilities to share things that felt really important in a moment of increasing fascism and authoritarianism. And it seemed important also to do it collectively and collaboratively, framing translation as a political project. And I think, for me, probably for many of us, it was also important to feel like we were doing something that was within our individual specializations, something that would make our work feel important to the world.
Elizabeth: I like what you’re saying, Amy, especially about thinking of translation as a political project, because I think it’s also important to flag that this project came out of us being in graduate school and having varying degrees of frustration with the apolitical or non-political nature of a lot of work that was being done around translation and otherwise. So this was a way that we as grad students could contribute something that was very explicitly political—unapologetically so—while also being very attentive to the aesthetic questions behind the pieces we were publishing.
Zach: Yeah, and thinking about the specific context in which this project was germinated, there was just so much discussion of untranslatability happening at the moment. And it’s an important idea, or a useful phrase, but it’s also part of what felt so apolitical. The moment may have felt for many like this big exception, an untranslatable moment [with the election of Trump in 2016]. And so it felt really interesting and important for us to find, to solicit and translate pieces of antifascist writing from different time periods. That’s for me an important and interesting aspect of the work we’ve done: to make a resource for the moment.
Lauren: Yeah, I agree. And for me, it felt really exciting to have something practical to do. Especially given the context that originated our work or brought us together, that context being so apolitical, disaffected, sort of navel-gazey and theoretical. It felt really good to have something to do. And to have the thing we were doing involve material and conversations that were coming to us from outside our own community. And that we were creating context. That whatever exceptionally strange thing was happening in the United States was actually not all that exceptionally strange, not historically, not world-historically.
Continue reading “Autointerview: the Barricade Editorial Collective interviews itself”
