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  From the issue dated February 1, 2002

  Globalizing the Exchange of Ideas

  By COLIN DAY
 
   As I sit at my computer, a steady flow of ships sails past my
  window, arriving at and leaving Hong Kong, the world's busiest
  container port. Manufactured goods stream out from here to all
  corners of the earth. So, as I sit at home, I see
  globalization manifest.
 
  My colleagues and I here are in scholarly publishing, however,
  not in manufacturing; we're trying to focus not on
  globalization, but on globalism. That's a distinction, I fear,
  that too many scholarly publishers in the United States, where
  I formerly worked at the University of Michigan Press, have
  still to make. If we are ever to have a genuinely global
  exchange of ideas, we must focus on globalism.
 
  Scholarly publishers, of course, play their part in the
  phenomenon of globalization, by which I mean the increasing
  dispersal of manufacturing and the growth of world trade in
  manufactured goods. Books are manufactured goods, and
  scholarly publishers on occasion choose to typeset, print, and
  bind their books outside the United States. Those who publish
  books in color do so most frequently, often placing orders
  with Hong Kong printers, who then ship the books back to North
  America. In fact, however, the books are rarely actually
  printed in Hong Kong. That is nearly always done over the
  border in China, or what I now have learned to refer to as the
  "mainland." The front offices are all that remain in the
  high-wage economy of Hong Kong. Such increased and increasing
  difficulty in tracing who is actually doing the work is one
  little-noticed but important aspect of the globalization
  process.
 
  Once the books are produced, American publishers may say that
  they market their books worldwide, but realistically, most of
  the markets they reach are to be found in the other developed
  countries. North American presses sell to Europe, Japan, the
  rest of Australasia, and to a few other countries with high
  enough levels of purchasing power to buy books bearing
  American prices.
 
  "Co-publishing" is still another component of the
  foreign-trade picture. In this process, a single printing of a
  book is done in one country, but some copies are made bearing
  a different imprint. Those copies are then shipped in bulk to
  the co-publisher in another country, who has an exclusive
  right to sell the book in its territory. North American books
  usually go to Britain and, occasionally, to Australia. (More
  frequently -- the British are so much better at selling than
  buying in this area -- the process brings books to North
  America.) Note that such titles seem, on casual inspection, to
  originate with the co-publisher and thus do not appear to be
  imports.
 
  If, by globalization, we mean the physical flow of goods, then
  those are the means by which scholarly publishers participate
  in the grand process.
 
  There are, of course, other ways that North American scholarly
  publishers reach out to make international connections. In
  particular, they acquire manuscripts from scholars in other
  countries, although, again, much of the flow is between
  developed countries, predominantly Australia, Britain, Canada,
  and the United States. Then there are translations into
  English, but it is hard enough to arrange those even from
  major European languages, so the number from other languages
  -- Japanese and Chinese perhaps excepted -- is utterly
  minuscule. In the other direction, there are a modest number
  of translations from English into a more heterodox range of
  languages. However, very few publishers would claim that
  translations in either direction affect a significant part of
  their lists. In the case of both manuscripts from other
  countries and translations, therefore, we're looking at
  phenomena that are hardly detectable in the overall flow of
  scholarly publishing in the developed world.
 
  Nevertheless, to think about the acquisition of foreign
  manuscripts and about translations is to shift our attention
  from the physical flow of goods to the transfer of ideas. This
  is to move from globalization to globalism: from physical
  exchange to intellectual exchange. Encouraging the latter is
  -- or should be -- the focus of scholarly presses. After all,
  their mission is to disseminate scholarship and ideas.
  Globalism is about fulfilling a broader conception of that
  mission.
 
  Presses, of course, have to deal with the business side of
  publishing. So they have to attend to the physical transfer of
  goods that globalization encompasses. But those
  considerations, however important financially, should take
  second place to the nurturing of international intellectual
  exchange.
 
  What is characteristic of the international activities that
  today's academic publishers undertake? They all involve flows
  between what scholars have called the Center and the
  Periphery, or within the Center -- between the West and the
  Rest, or within the West. And, with two exceptions, one
  uninteresting but the other important, the flow is from the
  Center to the Periphery: The messages are being sent from the
  West to the Rest.
 
  One exception is the flow of finished books from such places
  as Hong Kong. I do not see that as raising any issues for the
  discussion of globalism. It is purely a phenomenon of physical
  trade -- of globalization. The other is the acquisition of
  manuscripts from authors in the Periphery. The numbers are
  small and should be larger, but they give promise of a broader
  sharing of concepts. Or do they?
 
  What is the typical process? Look at what happens at American
  university presses. The manuscript arrives and is evaluated by
  an American editor and, nearly certainly, by American
  reviewers applying American perspectives. Its sales potential
  in the American market will be a major factor in determining
  whether or not it will get published. If the author is
  referring to non-American phenomena, he or she will be asked
  to provide additional explanation, so the American reader will
  be able to grasp the points being made. In brief, a manuscript
  from the Periphery will be put through a rigorous American and
  Americanizing filter.
 
  Chen Kwan-hsing, a noted Taiwanese academic, has complained:
  "When the international academic publishing industry is
  increasingly market-oriented towards the 'U.S.' readership
  (because 'that is where the biggest market is'), it is
  increasingly difficult to deal with the question of context;
  for contextualizing can always mean that critical work is for
  them (the U.S. readership). ... [W]orks written outside the
  U.S. are always asked to contextualize when addressing 'local
  issues,' or even to analyze issues within a language or
  framework which American academics are familiar with."
 
  One response would be for American publishers to shrug their
  shoulders and say that they really cannot ignore the financial
  constraints that force such contextualization, the pressures
  that force them to use an American filter in their decision
  making. They might also shrug and say that scholars are always
  going to value a reputation in the United States, because they
  aspire, if not to permanent positions, at least to regular
  invitations to visiting positions there.
 
  If one is thinking just as a publisher, such responses are
  explicable and reasonable. However, for university presses,
  with their higher mission, shrugs are not good enough. That,
  says Chen, is a way of "reproducing the existing power
  structure of global capitalism and the political
  nation-states." Or, to simplify: To shrug is to accept and
  reinforce the hegemony of American ideas. I lay that down as a
  challenge to those university presses that would prefer to
  respond and not just to shrug. The challenge is to work around
  the operational constraints that demand the use of an American
  filter.
 
  The question then becomes: How can flows within the Periphery
  be encouraged, and how can unfiltered ideas be sent from the
  Periphery to the Center? Indeed, how can the metaphor of the
  Center and the Periphery be broken down and a situation
  created that can better be described as a web of
  interconnected and equally privileged, or rather
  nonprivileged, nodes? Or, to put it another way: How can
  Anglo-American work be provincialized? The answer has two
  dimensions: the publishing infrastructure within countries,
  and the mechanism for the flow of texts among countries.
 
  Clearly, even if an easy and unprivileged flow of manuscripts
  or books among countries could be achieved, nothing
  fundamentally would be changed if the destination country
  lacked the mechanisms actually to get the works to the
  readers. People who have been fortunate enough to visit
  publishers in developing countries have been made very aware
  of how many things that publishers working in rich countries
  take for granted. Presses in less-favored nations may have to
  work without a pool of publishing skills, without easily
  available printing capacity, without mechanisms for
  distributing books, without bookstores, even without a
  reliable postal system. And, of course, there are the
  egregious limitations that American publishers don't face --
  like censorship, both direct and subtle.
 
  In Azerbaijan, for example, where I have served as a
  consultant several times, there is one main printer,
  government-owned. Clearly, anything too critical of the
  government might find the publisher's capacity fully booked or
  paper temporarily in limited supply. It is not impossible to
  sell books in the capital, Baku, although bookstores are
  hardly common or good when found, and most appear to be
  controlled by state entities. But there truly is no mechanism
  for shipping a load of books elsewhere in the country --
  literally no distribution system for books, or anything much
  else. Such problems are multiplied many, many times throughout
  the world.
 
  It is easy to take for granted a healthy publishing sector. It
  is only when confronted with a situation like that in
  Azerbaijan that one begins to appreciate how important free,
  independent, and creative book publishers are for the
  development and maintenance of a vigorous democratic society,
  for a flourishing literary culture, and for the essential
  discussion of serious ideas. While the need for free
  newspapers and magazines is widely appreciated, their main
  role is an immediate one, whereas books provide the channel
  for the serious, thorough exploration of ideas that is
  essential for slowly building a truly strong and mature free
  society.
 
  That means that any effort to redress the dominance of the
  Center should also be designed to nurture the publishing
  houses and the publishing infrastructures of the Periphery.
  Bringing in multinational publishers would be exactly the
  wrong way to help individual countries build or strengthen
  their indigenous presses. Consider what has happened in
  Africa. As the Danish scholar Robert Phillipson comments in
  his book Linguistic Imperialism: "The parlous state of
  publishing in Africa is a direct consequence of the relative
  dominance of British publishing in Africa." Policies must be
  designed to nurture independence, not dependence.
 
  Now, consider the other part of the big picture -- enabling
  the flow of manuscripts and books within the Periphery, among
  countries that are outside the core. In the bad old days,
  there was only one basic choice: to put books on a ship or
  perhaps on a plane. Now we have welcome alternatives to the
  physical movement of books. Welcome, because physically
  transporting books is slow -- a hindrance if the objective is
  to expedite the exchange of ideas and enable transnational
  debate; because moving books internationally is costly; and
  because doing so imposes one standard of production quality --
  and thus approximately the same purchase price -- on everyone,
  rich or poor.
 
  Here the Internet lurches onto stage, playing its familiar and
  well-practiced role as panacea. A manuscript can be sent
  digitally to another publishing house in another country. Then
  the recipient can, with its local knowledge, determine the
  best mode of production and the best means of distribution and
  promotion within its country or perhaps its region. To be
  sure, there are business and cost issues that would need
  sorting out before that rough vision could become a practical
  reality. But it would increase the supply of projects
  available to nascent publishing houses struggling against the
  weakness of their country's infrastructure, and at the same
  time put decision making in the hands of local publishing
  houses that know their readers, the needs of those readers,
  and the best way to get books to them.
 
  Even if we can change the structure of the flow of ideas and
  eliminate the dominance of the Center, we are still faced with
  the problem of language and still face either the complexities
  of many translations or the imposition of a single language. I
  am afraid I cannot see any solution, aside from the fantasy of
  good automatic translation, that does not leave us with the
  hegemony of English, perhaps challenged by Chinese or Spanish.
  The complexity of the problem is shown when one considers
  that, in truth, the issue is no longer even just whether
  English should be given a privileged place in worldwide
  publishing. We now have a host of Englishes, spoken and
  written differently around the globe. Should we put them
  through the filtering and homogenizing process of
  Anglo-American publishers?
 
  The challenge is more than just one of translation. The
  challenge is to become inclusive, to accept different
  viewpoints, different contexts, and different forms of
  expression. That is not an easy task; we are all more
  comfortable reading in familiar language about familiar
  things. Yet at least some of us, when we travel, forgo the
  safe cocoon of the tour group and the package that wraps us in
  the familiar and the reassuring. We take our backpacks and
  travel independently. Should we not also be independent
  travelers intellectually? Should we not struggle, with relish,
  with languages, assumptions, and contexts? And should not
  serious scholarly publishers aid that adventurousness, leading
  treks, not package tours, bringing us unfiltered the work of
  scholars from abroad? The objective, however, is even greater:
  It is to create a global web of equality -- equality of
  intellectual exchange and equality of intellectual engagement.
 
  Last January, at the University of Hong Kong, we had a small
  conference at which scholars came from nearly all the
  countries of the crescent that stretches from Pakistan to
  South Korea: Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia,
  Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, and
  Vietnam. The topic was the teaching of American literature in
  Asia. The caliber of the participants was exceptional, and
  they had much to contribute. I say that not to be patronizing,
  but to lament the fact that, because of the impediments of the
  present system, to a large extent the only role that such
  scholars can play in worldwide scholarly debates is as
  readers. And they can only do that with great difficulty. To
  thus limit their role is to deprive scholarly debates of the
  participation of lively, original minds actively contributing
  ideas, not just receiving them. And minds that bring truly new
  perspectives.
 
  Colin Day is publisher of Hong Kong University Press.
 

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 Copyright 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education