About us
Small/Minor Literatures & Cultures is an international collaborative network of researchers who work on small/minor literatures and cultures both theoretically and empirically with a special focus on a comparative analysis of their contacts, similarities and differences. In mainstream literary scholarship, the term that enjoys a wider currency is minor literature, whose three key characteristics are, according to the foundational 1975 book by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation”. “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language”, Deleuze and Guattari claim, “it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language”.
Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari trace their definition of minor literature to Kafka’s theoretical ruminations about the role of Jewish literature in Warsaw and Prague as discussed in his Journal, in which Kafka himself listed three key characteristics of kleine Literaturen: Lebhaftigkeit (liveliness), Entlastung (less constraint) and Popularität (popularity). And yet, neither did Kafka talked about minor but small (kleine) literatures, nor did Kafka’s corpus comprise literature in German by Jewish writers in Warsaw and Prague, nor do Kafka’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s descriptions coincide in their three characteristics.
These discrepancies notwithstanding, Deleuze and Guattari’s terminological choice and definition have been accepted as originally formulated by Kafka. Our network aims to rethink Deleuze and Guattari’s concept by, on the one hand, reinscribing it within the set small/minor literatures and cultures and, on the other hand, contrasting it with a larger context beyond the limits of Central Europe. Furthermore, the concept of small/minor literature is introduced within a larger constellation as tentatively represented by:
- colonial literature
- cross-border language
- cultural diversity
- diversity and education
- emergent literatures
- endangered language
- ethnocultural identity
- identity politics
- indigenous peoples
- insular literature
- internal colonialism
- interperipherality
- language minority
- language planning
- language rights
- languages of lesser diffusion
- less widely-taught language
- lesser-translated language
- liminal literature
- linguicide
- linguistic diversity
- literature of disquiet
- literature of exiguity
- major vs. minor languages
- marginal literature
- marginalized language
- minor cosmopolitanism
- minor transnationalism
- minority
- minorized language
- minority media
- minority translation
- multilingualism
- national minority
- native language
- non-territorial language
- peripherality
- regional literature
- regionalism
- small nation
- stateless nations
- world literature
Minority is not the object of one single discipline, but a transdisciplinary phenomenon. There is no such thing as a privileged approach for minority studies. It is a field to which many disciplines contribute, including linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, education, law, sociology, gender studies, religion, and politics, to name but a few.