ABSTRACT
Using the lens of racial capitalism, this chapter outlines how the inequitable distribution of forms of capital—including economic, cultural, symbolic, social, and intellectual capital—works to exclude translators of color from the literary publishing industry, specifically in the United States and the United Kingdom. Tracing how this inequitable distribution of capital is reproduced at every step along the way toward publishing careers and the literary translation profession in particular, the chapter exposes the lack of racial diversity in the profession as a systemic problem requiring radical change, especially because under the current structure, whiteness functions as a type of capital that cannot be fully redistributed. The end of the chapter focuses on intellectual capital through copyright, bringing together scholarship from translation studies, critical race studies, and intellectual property studies to show how current copyright law relies upon a logic of authorship and ownership rooted in white supremacist ideas about who is capable of producing “original” work. Transformative racial justice in the literary translation profession will thus require rejecting the racial capitalist logic of ownership and authorship and abandoning intellectual property.
