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.
Question, for members of the collective who joined after the founding: What motivated you to join? And what do you feel has changed since 2017—in our capacities and needs, in the world?
Grace: Well, I don’t know if this is going to answer the question of what’s changed, but the question that came up of what can I do? really resonated with me: what is a practical thing that can be done about our political situation? Whenever I would feel despairing about the world, I would think, what’s an action I can take that’s in line with things that I do and the things that I care about, literary translation being one of those things. Collaborating with Barricade—first as a contributor, and then as an editor at large, and then as a member of the editorial collective—gave me a place for that. It’s something I can do personally, but the nature of translation allows what you do personally to extend beyond your own community. So Barricade offers a space for these things to happen. Our interests, our labor as individuals, the things we can do matter at this scale.
Jessie: As for what’s changed, a couple of things. First of all, most of us have since finished grad school, and life has a very different rhythm to it. That’s been challenging, but also interesting, to let the project grow with us in a weirdly personal way. Speaking more broadly, I don’t think there’s been a moment since we started this project that hasn’t been a crisis moment, or felt like one. And it’s the intensity of that feeling, and how we frame what the crisis is from moment to moment that has definitely changed a lot in ten years. And that’s really shifted how we think of the project and what it means, many times over.
Lauren: I am interested in this shift, from Barricade being a grad student project to being a project that we keep alive, as a non-coerced collective of individuals. For me, at the ten-year mark, and five years post-graduate school, I feel very powerfully that Barricade has been an anchor in my life, and it’s been something I’ve relied on, also for professional legibility. Here’s this thing I did, I do; I spend a lot of time thinking about these things and doing these things with this bunch of people that mean a lot to me. But, on a very personal level, I am experiencing something of a shift, and I’m asking myself: is this enough? Is it enough for me, personally, to gain community from this project? I recognize these different rhythms in our lives, the demands that impinge on us and occupy our attention, and I recognize our individual investments are going to be differential. I’m glad we have this opportunity to ask ourselves what our vision is going forward, and what binds us, and how we bind to the project.
Amy: Yeah, I think ten years is a lot of time in the life of a person. And I want to flag that, because ten years is also a long time in the life of a person living under the rise of fascisms globally. What I’m trying to suggest with that is a question of need and capacity. When this project started, we were out every weekend protesting. And energy flags, everybody’s energy. Ten years ago, I was in my early 30s, and now I’m in my early 40s, and that’s a different energy; collective energy, too, is flagging for different or similar reasons, I can’t tell. But it all feels urgent. On the one hand, I want to hold that we are older, and we do have jobs, and I want this project to be sustainable. I want that original rage and energy, but in a sustainable way, because this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Elizabeth: I was also thinking, when you said something, Lauren, about the community around Barricade, how that community used to be obvious, but not everyone is in New York anymore, though this is still in some ways a New York-based project. At some point somebody mentioned the Barricade diaspora, which is funny, but how do you actually activate that? What does it look like, realistically speaking, when we no longer have an institutional home, not even in an informal sense?
[Barricade is a volunteer-run collective. Our fundraising efforts have, to date, been aimed at paying for each next print run. In its early years, Barricade received financial support from the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, though that affiliation has since ceased.]
Amy: To the question of the diaspora, this is something we need to think about and work on. Just a lack of knowledge of one another in a sort of real, three-dimensional space, and the kind of bonds that you can build in that way, we have found these difficult to build. I want us to have a serious diaspora beyond the city, but it’s been very hard to keep those connections.
Lauren: You know, I have a thought about that. I think what makes people feel inclined to participate is being tasked, rather than being asked about their interest in a thing. I know that we have this lateral, this horizontal, non-hierarchical orientation, but maybe there is such a thing as a core and a periphery of the willing.
Grace: I want to return to the general energy thing. The project started with graduate students being frustrated with apoliticalness, maybe of a specific department, but also maybe with translation studies as a whole. And now we’re done with grad school, and some of us have various academic positions, and we’re dealing with the drain of that from a different angle. We’re dealing with the fact that a lot of people in academic positions are feeling precarious when it comes to speaking their minds about fascism and standing firm in that: I’m going to talk about this, even though if somebody looks into it too hard, it could put my job at risk. The risk is now of ourselves becoming the apolitical people. And, in terms of what’s changed, it’s worth thinking about how our lives and positions have changed and how to direct our energy against the apoliticalness of the academy.
Question: What distinguishes Barricade from other translation journals, even other literary journals?
Elizabeth: One thing I’ve also always appreciated about Barricade is the fact that you can be a first-time translator, and you’re just as likely to get published as somebody who’s well-established. I think making that space is important, especially for translation, because my impression is that it’s really hard to get translations published in most literary journals if you aren’t already established. This, I think, also speaks to how our editorial and operational practices reflect our mission. And that’s something I’ve always thought is really important about what we do—the level and the kind of editorial work that we put into the pieces that we publish.
Grace: I have seen other literary journals that often seem to be vehicles for pre-publication for established translators, and that is not what we do. Even though it’s not an anonymous process, the work is judged on its own merit. We don’t prioritize submissions that will become a book publication in two years. What we do is so much more about how the work itself speaks to the larger project than about the translator’s credentials. I think that sets us apart.
Lauren: Yeah, I feel the “barrier to entry” question a lot. I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why rights acquisition is such a barrier to entry in the field, especially for early career translators, even for people who don’t think of themselves as translators but are only interested in translating this one piece because they came across it and it moved them. I’m increasingly interested in translating from the public domain. I wonder what kinds of materials, and what kinds of risks and experiments, would emerge from that if that were your constraint. Say you don’t have access to other resources, to writers, to publishers, you didn’t get an MFA, you don’t live in New York; say you’re just an impassioned reader, then, if the work’s in the public domain, you can, theoretically, make a translation of it. And put it anywhere you want.
On a similar note, one of the things that is really interesting to me about Barricade—which probably has something to do with the fact that everyone who’s an editor here is also a trained scholar—is that we insist on the paratextual. In a way that isn’t shaming the translation for perceived or projected failure, but that is actually trying to create what I think of as an archive. The real significance of our editorial work is the fashioning, with our writers, of these translators’ notes. That is our mission. That’s how I think about it, anyway: in large part as making an archive of a certain way of countering nefarious power. Through language.
Zach: Yeah, and I was thinking too, Lauren, about this question of an archive, and how Grace also mentioned our unconcern with the marketability of what we are publishing. Along those lines, I really like all the different genres that appear in any given issue. It’s like there are these itinerant or diasporic pieces that are waiting to find a home, that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have any sort of outlet to be published, you know? Some of my favorite pieces we’ve worked on are the “small” or “short” ones.
Grace: What Zach just said connects, in my mind, with what I really like about the Barricade mission statement that the founders came up with—which is to keep things in motion. We counter authoritarianism by keeping information in motion, and we move the information through translation. Our collaborative editorial process is, I think, really interesting and different as well.
Question: How do our editorial and operational practices reflect our values and our mission—or how could they better do so?
Grace: I have experienced blind peer review in literary translation journals, like an academic journal, and I love that we don’t do it that way. It was the editorial process that recruited me to Barricade. It was the fact that I felt so much care and attention on my piece; instead of the editorial collective saying, “oh, this isn’t good, fix this,” they said, “how do we work together to make this the strongest piece it can be?” I felt that I grew as a translator. And then I got to do that, as an editor-at-large, with another translator for the next issue, and it was a much deeper experience than I’ve had in other literary venues. It really felt collaborative in such a genuine way.
Elizabeth: Just having now also provided some editorial feedback for another translation journal, it was interesting for me because it was so different from Barricade‘s practice. Sure, there were things about the translations that needed addressing, but I didn’t want to only say “this is wrong”; I wanted to say “why did you make this choice? What are you trying to convey with this word choice?” But there was no avenue for that type of feedback, so I was writing all of these very long comments, being like “??” It just made me appreciate our collaborative, conversational back and forth, where it’s not blind, and you know who your editors are, and you’re really working with them in the interest of the piece.
Amy: I think back to the “Nihilist Manifesto,” which I edited. I really loved that piece, and it was really fun to work on because, when I asked the translator a question, it opened up this whole history of the piece that we had not yet learned. The piece is in Korean, translated from Korean; but it was written when Korea was under Japanese occupation, so it was actually written in Japanese first, and then translated into Korean. But the Japanese it was written in was an old style of Japanese that didn’t make historical sense. And so the translator did some research, and it turns out that Japan had actually reversed its [colonial] language policy just for Korea, specifically to make it less readable, less intelligible, in order to block communication. And so this open editorial process, it really brought this piece to life, because we learned all of this stuff about the historical backstory, all because I had a question about word choice that ended up opening up this bigger political question.
Zach: Our values are in the editorial process. Elizabeth, the approach that you just explained was, like, you want to help clarify and elucidate; ours is a collaborative effort that isn’t hierarchical. We might obviously have different linguistic abilities, but we try to not make it a power dynamic in that regard—which is, of course, perhaps an impossible task in many ways, but the spirit of it is more collaborative.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and I think that what we do also respects translation more as creative work, where obviously accuracy on some level is important, but that is not the only or even the most important thing that we’re considering. Especially with something like poetry. If I look at a poem that someone has rendered from Spanish into English, and I think, this looks fucked up, maybe I think this is some sort of intentional thing that they’re doing, though I really have no idea. In the one version of editorial work, I start redlining it. But in our version, I could ask, okay, what was your approach here? I think that this affords a lot more creative agency on the part of translators.
Grace: The translator’s autonomy, that’s what I was thinking. Like, if there’s something that the editor disagrees with, the translator always has the chance to say, well, this is why I did that. Maybe any given editor wouldn’t have made the same choice, but it’s not that particular editor’s translation, and there’s just more tolerance for that. And that’s a way of putting non-hierarchy into practice.
Amy: Lauren, I think the verbiage from our submissions page was yours, the anti-fascist, not only in content, but in method part.
[The editorial review process, as stated on the website: “As the name of the journal suggests, Barricade is anti-fascist not only in content but in method as well. We consider the editing process to be a conversation designed to clarify both the text and the translator’s unique approach to it. Our editors are committed above all to respecting a translator’s style and approach. The goals of the editing process are therefore: to confirm the linguistic accuracy of the translation, to clarify and shape the text to publication standard, to elucidate a translator’s method or philosophy and thereby expand our collective imagination of the multifarious praxes of translation, and to bring the manuscript into conformity with our style guide.”]
Lauren: Yeah, I remember that, I remember we agonized for hours around literally just such a table as we’re sitting at now, in a building across the street, to make sure that our processes were anti-fascist. And I remember very clearly then, we didn’t use the word curiosity. It’s a word I would use now, as an anti-fascist orientation, but I know that we absolutely agreed: we ask questions, we don’t redline.
Question: Why are we doing this still? What are the conditions we need to be able to go on—materially, interpersonally, philosophically? What are the stakes of keeping this project alive?
Elizabeth: I think that as we continue to think about what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, and how we’re going to keep doing it, since we are now more diasporic, the model of collaboration is probably going to become more important as well—both to keep our presence alive, but also to have other energy coming in, even if it’s just on ad-hoc, one-off projects. For example, the zine we did with Jazra Khaleed: we got to work with people we hadn’t worked with before [World Poetry Books], doing events in circumstances we hadn’t been able to previously [The People’s Forum]. And that helped me keep connected to this project and to be like, okay, there are still spaces for this to happen, even if we aren’t putting out the annual book right now; we can do these other things with like-minded people and like-minded organizations. So I am hoping that will remain something we do, and maybe even become more prevalent as we move forward.
Amy: I want to hit a point where I feel like, oh, the political conditions of the world are such that this doesn’t need to continue…
Grace: Brackets, all laugh.
Lauren: What are the conditions we need to go on? Fascism.
Elizabeth: I mean especially in terms of thinking of the stakes. Amy, I’m still thinking about what you said: ten years ago, or even five, we were all protesting every week, and I certainly am not doing that now. So what is at stake in keeping this project alive? It’s not having another leftist or anti-fascist thing die, as so many have in the past ten years, either because institutions no longer support this kind of work or people are so fucking burned out. And I’m certainly burned out, but I also don’t want this to go away. I think it’s important that it doesn’t.
Amy: COVID in the middle of fascism really felt like this huge sort of disconnect that I don’t know how to bridge. I feel like, in some sort of facile way, I stopped making new relationships somehow during COVID, really. And I think it became this sort of generational block. I teach a class on histories of revolution and narratives of revolution and things like that, and so many times I have to be like, for the students: no, what’s happening isn’t normal. To have to insist on that. So I think that is what’s at stake. And maybe one place that we’re foundering is in making those intergenerational connections. Much like our texts are reaching across time, I really think we need legitimate younger folks here at the table.
Jessie: I think it’s important to acknowledge that, when you talk about COVID changing things, you also have to talk about Gaza and the encampments, how that changed everything, especially for younger people. Since 2023, 2024, teaching has been really different. We may not be going to protests quite as often as we used to, because we’re older and our knees hurt, but our students are not going to protests in the way that they were a few years ago either, because they got beaten up, and they got arrested, and they got all these draconian punishments.
But, as the non-literature person who just sort of wandered into this for random personal reasons, my work being in the social sciences, I really keep trying to insist to my students: you have to be reading fiction, you have to be reading poetry. There’s two things you guys have to do right now: one is to figure out how you’re gonna take care of each other, because nobody else is gonna do it; and two is you have to figure out how to keep imagining something different from this, because you’re gonna have a chance to build that. And, as regards this endeavor to convince them that what’s happening isn’t normal, I think it’s also important, on the other hand, to convince them that people have lived through and under these conditions, and created beautiful things, even during and in the middle of it, and certainly in the aftermath of it. And that will continue to happen, and we have to have models for that, too. And this is something that you find in Barricade across, you know, every decade, as far back as we’ve published.
Grace: Yeah, which reminds me of one of the points Lauren made in the beginning, which is: we find ourselves in this uniquely terrible time, and translating reminds us that it’s actually not so uniquely terrible. Which is not to minimize the current circumstances, but to try to fight against this myopia. I feel like we’re able to combat these things from different directions. We can draw on other languages, other literatures, other time periods to see what has been done. So, I don’t know, I feel like the project can offer different dimensions of…I don’t know if hope is the right word, but, something, something to connect to.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and as the universities become more and more fascistic themselves, there need to be other spaces—whether that’s virtual or real or whatever—in which people can make these connections and have these opportunities. Because sure, we can do this in our classrooms to varying degrees, depending on where we are, but that may not be the best place, certainly not the only place to be doing it.
Zach: Yeah, and for me, some of the stakes of wanting to continue the project are in what Amy answered, about building more intergenerational ties. Because for me, this connects to the editorial, the antifascist practice and content. The way I see the editorial mission is in this non-hierarchical way; we don’t position ourselves as experts in a field, where we impart knowledge to our contributors or gatekeep them or whatnot.
And I think that’s something that, for me, is a personal motivation: it’s a way to keep learning, and learning about different movements, and connecting with other people. It’s the curiosity, the curiosity Lauren mentioned earlier, I think that’s a big part of it for me.
Lauren: One thing Barricade has done for me is to forge friendships. There are contributors with whom I regularly correspond, who have come to the city and stayed in my apartment, and this is something that I love about it. And something that I love about the classroom, too. My students are adults, which means they’re both younger and older than me. And if we let our imaginations think not just about younger generations but older ones, and what we have to learn from them, we can expand in both directions from our… is ten years for a magazine middle age? It is definitely my middle age…
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Thank you for reading our self-reflections, as the Barricade editorial collective and the project itself enters its middle years.
We’ll be putting out another (anachronistic) book-length volume in the coming months—our sixth! Send us your work—or a note indicating your intention to submit—before summer ends!
And please also get in touch if you’d like to become involved in any way. Barricade is a volunteer-run, mission-driven, autonomous publishing project.
Find us at barricade_journal on Instagram.