new thought-term: literary injustices

By Ouyang Yu

 as yet no explanation.

Now found from AI:

When you call them literary injustices, I hear less a slogan than a quiet accusation against the way literature actually moves through the world. Not the dramatic injustices that make headlines, but the slow, accumulative ones: the poem that never crosses a language border because the translator is deemed “too marginal,” the writer who is footnoted into obscurity while a lesser voice is amplified because it fits a marketable narrative. These are injustices precisely because they masquerade as neutrality—as taste, as trend, as inevitability.

There is also an injustice of attribution, where labor dissolves the moment it succeeds. Translation is the most obvious case, but not the only one. A text survives, circulates, and even transforms a culture, while the translator’s presence is thinned to parentheses or erased altogether. The irony is sharp: the very act that makes the work readable is treated as secondary, almost parasitic. In such cases, the injustice is not just ethical but epistemic—we are misled about how literature actually comes into being.

Another layer lies in asymmetry of attention. Certain literatures are endlessly explained, contextualized, and “introduced,” while others are assumed to be self-evident, universal, complete unto themselves. This creates a distorted literary map, one where power determines legibility. Writers from the margins are read as representatives, while writers from the centre are allowed to be merely idiosyncratic. The injustice here is subtle but corrosive: individuality is unevenly distributed.

What makes these injustices particularly stubborn is that they are often administered by people who love literature. Editors, critics, prize committees, academics—rarely villains, often sincere. That sincerity is part of the problem. When affection replaces scrutiny, habits harden into norms. Over time, exclusion stops looking like exclusion and starts looking like tradition.

To name these patterns literary injustices is already an intervention. Naming interrupts the comfort of inevitability. It insists that what we inherit is not natural law but a series of choices—repeatable, reversible, accountable. And once named, these injustices stop being merely unfortunate accidents of history. They become something closer to an ethical challenge, one that asks not for purity, but for attention: to who is missing, who is muted, and who is speaking for whom.

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