ABSTRACT
Debates about translation track well with the historical evolution of comparative literature, especially in the United States, as the early reports of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) make clear. Emily Apter in fact declares questions of translatability to be at the "theoretical fulcrum" of the discipline. It thus made sense that in 2002, in coordination with the opening of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), the doctoral program in the Department of Comparative Literature launched its emphasis in Translation Studies and Literary Translation. Nationwide, the field of comparative literature was undergoing a major shift in a genuinely global direction at the time. Theoretical reflections on translation as a tool either of "official" discourses and the hegemonic "suppression" of difference or of contestatory subnational self-voicing reflect positions articulated in the kinds of postcolonial theory commonly privileged in comparative literature as a discipline.