Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of essays investigates the importance of "minor discourses" and minority cultures across national boundaries.
Trade Review“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, 1688–1804Minor 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.” -- Vijay Mishra * Intersections *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally / Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih 1
I. Theorizing
Inclusions: Psychoanalysis, Transnationalism, and Minority Cultures / Suzanne Gearhart 27
Rational and Irrational Choices: Form, Affect and Ethics / David Palumbo-Liu 41
Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or, "When" does a "Chinese" Woman Become a "Feminist"? / Shu-Mei Shih 73
The Postmodern Subaltern: Globalization Theory and the Subject of Ethnic, Area and Postcolonial Studies / Susan Koshy 109
II. Historicizing
Murder in Montmartre: Race, Sex, and Crime in Jazz Age Paris / Tyler Stovall 135
Giving "Minor" Pasts a Future: Narrating History in Transnational Cinematic Autobiography / Kathleen McHugh 155
Major and Minor Discourses of the Vernacular: Discrepant African Histories / Moradewun Adejunmobi 179
III. Reading, Writing, Performing
Transcolonial Translations: Shakespeare in Mauritius / Françoise Lionnet 201
Postcolonial Theory and the Predicament of "Minor Literature" / Ali Behdad 223
The Calm Beauty of Japan at Almost the Speed of Sound: Sakamoto Kyu and the Translations of Rockabilly / Michael K. Bourdaghs 237
IV. Spatializing
Cartographies of Globalization, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean "Binta" Breeze / Jenny Sharpe 261
The Double Logic of Minor Spaces / Seiji M. Lippit 283
National Space as Minor Space: Afro-Brazilian Culture and the Pelourinho / Elizabeth A. Marchant 301
Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje / Rafael Perez-Torres 317
Contributors 339
Index 343
