Minor Transnationalism

Minor Transnationalism moves beyond a binary model of minority cultural formations that often dominates contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies. Where that model presupposes that minorities necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of assimilation and opposition, this volume brings together case studies that reveal a much more varied terrain of minority interactions with both majority cultures and other minorities. The contributors recognize the persistence of colonial power relations and the power of global capital, attend to the inherent complexity of minor expressive cultures, and engage with multiple linguistic formations as they bring postcolonial minor cultural formations across national boundaries into productive comparison.Based in a broad range of fields—including literature, history, African studies, Asian American studies, Asian studies, French and francophone studies, and Latin American studies—the contributors complicate ideas of minority cultural formations and challenge the notion that transnationalism is necessarily a homogenizing force. They cover topics as diverse as competing versions of Chinese womanhood; American rockabilly music in Japan; the trope of mestizaje in Chicano art and culture; dub poetry radio broadcasts in Jamaica; creole theater in Mauritius; and race relations in Salvador, Brazil. Together, they point toward a new theoretical vocabulary, one capacious enough to capture the almost infinitely complex experiences of minority groups and positions in a transnational world.Contributors. Moradewun Adejunmobi, Ali Behdad, Michael Bourdaghs, Suzanne Gearhart, Susan Koshy, Françoise Lionnet, Seiji M. Lippit, Elizabeth Marchant, Kathleen McHugh, David Palumbo-Liu, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Jenny Sharpe, Shu-mei Shih , Tyler Stovall

“Highlighting minor-to-minor global networks that connect the margins without having to go through the center, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s intriguing collection sparkles when put next to the usual anthologies on globalization. Individual essays on theory, literacy, performance, cinema, music, architecture, and borderlands cumulatively emphasize the multiple outcomes of cultural transversality and horizontal mobility. Reaching beyond the triumphalism of mainstream globalization discourse, Minor Transnationalism demonstrates that the moment for a better understanding of minoritization has truly arrived.”—Srinivas Aravamudan, author of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, Minor Transnationalism opens up new approaches to reading minority cultures and major/minor dynamics of capitalist globalization and postcolonial emergence from Paris and Los Angeles to Japan, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Brazil. It wrests the ‘transnational’ away from tired paradigms of global capitalism or ethnic cooptation and makes it do the work of ‘minority-becoming.’ The result is a fabulous collection of cultural plenitude, globalized imagination, and critical lucidity.”—Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, “[A] remarkable collection of essays. . . . The volume's contributors finesse the argument for transnational cultures presented by Lionnet and Behdad and turn the volume itself into an accomplished exploration of the dynamic nature of minority lives in nation-states. This is one volume that readers will find especially persuasive and astoundingly informative.”

Françoise Lionnet is Chair of French and Francophone Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity.Shu-mei Shih is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937.