Amistad Política en la Página : The Materiality of Print Books as a Site of Feminist Translation

Abstract: What happens when a single book becomes multiple? What relations and processes are activated as a book travels across different territories and gets remade by different people, in different places, with different ideas, experiences, and materials? This essay considers these questions by examining the practices and products of networks of small, radical presses in Latin America, drawing on insights from the growing fields of feminist translation studies and feminist bibliography. Over the past decade, radical publishing in Latin America has been profoundly impacted by the new feminist movements. In this context, the print book has become a renewed site of political, cultural, and economic intervention, with experimentation flourishing around the ways knowledge production and material culture can foster and promote transnational solidarity by connecting diverse communities of readers across territories. Through the story of the multiple editions of The Book in Movement, I explore how the materiality of print books can be understood as a site of various modes of feminist translation, not only linguistic, but also cultural, economic, and political. In doing so, I argue that these operations of translation articulate and make visible heterogeneous networks of producers, while radically expanding understandings of, and possibilities for, readership.