This issue focuses on the extent to which global artists, video makers, and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms. This special issue of Public Culture finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's mid-century critique of the American 'culture industry'. This special issue explores a number of interrelated problems that arise from the question of a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. These include the marketing of national literature, the politics of publishing (with emphasis on the postcolonial dominance of Anglophone or standard language publishing houses), and the question of an emergent internationalized aesthetics. When the problem of a globalizing mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important questions of cultural commodification and, thus, ideology arise. How do some works gain international visibility, while others do not?