Contesting Stereotypes through Self-Representation? A Review of the Romani Exhibition Stands at the 2019 Frankfurt Book Fair

Romani literature was exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair at specific stands and events for the first time in 2019. This article reviews the presented literature and authors and discusses advantages and disadvantages of establishing the category “Romani literature” within the context of the Frankfurt Book Fair. It argues that the category provides a new platform for Romani authors as well as for Romani identity politics and was set up with the aim to fight existing racism against Roma. Making oneself visible as a diverse minority at such an event can help to break up stereotypes and constitutes a success after centuries of underrepresentation. At the same time, the article uncovers the danger of feeding into essentialism through the label “Romani literature” and reflects on the limitations of emancipatory politics when participating in a predominantly commercial event.

‘This Is What We Share’

This chapter focuses on the joint guests of honour at the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair, Flanders and the Netherlands – a rare case of two government organisations representing separate national groupings (Flanders and the Netherlands) coming together to present the literature of a single language (Dutch) on the international stage. It recounts how the two delegations’ shared status as guests of honour for 2016 came about through a collaboration between the Dutch Foundation for Literature and the Flemish Literature Fund (now known as Flanders Literature) and analyses the branding decisions made by the 2016 organizers. Conceptually, the chapter engages with perspectives from field theory and the sociology of translation to elaborate branding as a form of position-taking and guest of honour presentations as important mechanisms of transnational capital conversion.

State Cultural Policies in Georgia’s Small Book Market. Case of the Translation Grant Programme “Georgian Literature in Translation” (2010–2018)

This paper analyses translation support in the Georgian literary field by studying the case of the translation grant program “Georgian Literature in Translation” (2010-2018). Accordingly, it offers a quantitative and qualitative study of the selection of translation projects that have received grants from the Georgian National Book Center as of 2010, when the translation policy program was first launched. This study will consider a) which authors are being promoted by the state and which titles are being translated; b) which publishing houses have benefited the most from these subsidies; and c) which target languages are used in said projects, relying on the frameworks of the sociology of translation (Heilbron and Sapiro). The hypotheses of this paper are 1) that there is a strong impact of the Frankfurt Book Fair and an increase of state-supported translations; 2) a great role of German as a target language in these projects; and 3) relatively active translation flows in the region where Georgia is located. Fieldwork from the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair will serve as a complementary source, as well as the interviews that I have conducted with agents of the Georgian literary field.