Cultural mediators and distributed agency: the case of the publishing house Alfaguara (1976-1982)

Abstract

Establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between historical and relational approaches, the present case study reconstructs the reading committees of the publishing house Alfaguara during the Transition to democracy (1975–1982) in Spain. Eminent authors and translators, scholars, and relevant figures in the industry served on these committees. This makes them an intriguing object of study as a social network where publishing and translational decisions were taken in a distributed way permeated by the cultural and social environment, with members often wearing many hats at once. Archival and interview data about interactants background, their further evolution and objectives is fed into network analysis to obtain a neater picture of agency and structure as relational. Combining relational theory with Translation Studies from a complexity epistemology perspective allows us to revisit notions of translation, publishing, agency and cultural repertoire from a multi-faceted viewpoint. Such an approach to these constructs offers the opportunity of empirically investigating translational processes that contribute to the emergence of the cultural, and also the social; in this case, in the very concrete example of a translation network (the reading committees) performing at a critical point in the recent history of Spain when cultural and social changes were transforming the country.