We remain thankful to the Comparative Literature program, the administrator, Liz Cassel, and the chair, Veronika Fuechtner, for making possible the publication of Axium’s second issue.
With our inaugural issue, we had given translation the center stage in the mission of our journal to become a space where our notions of the ‘comparative’ and the ‘critical’ could be pushed and hopefully problematized, and where the most exciting thought is recognized as transcending national, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries.
For this second issue, we continued with this belief in translation studies and its place in the expansive project of comparative literature by featuring the work of students in Professor Lada Kolomiyets’s class “Decolonizing Translation” offered in Winter 2024.
While we had looked at translation through the lens of what survives and what gets inevitably obscured, our authors explored translation on the level of its role in (and against) colonization, that is, both as a channel of colonization and as the potential creative site of its contestment. Before this substantial endeavor, we recognized their work as transnational and transhistorical and so all the more resonant with our scholarly goals.
We hope again that the articles in this issue become instrumental examples of the kind of work that makes linguistic difference the matter of exciting intellectual dialogue.