Minor Transnationalism

by Françoise Lionnet (Editor)

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

368 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

Reviews

[Parlei · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent, challenging read which conceptualized a theoretical model of what Lionnet and Shih call "Minor Transnationalism." It is a model that allows us to approach minority subjects via lateral networks as opposed to only critiquing the center, thus, as they write, making the center the main focus of study as opposed to the minor (3).

Unlike the global, local, national, or international, which tends toward their own models of hegemony, "the transnational designates spaces and practices acted upon by border-crossing agents, be they dominant or marginal." (5) Therefore, it usefully intervenes on all of the previous and opens space for exploration, question-posing, and articulation. I particularly found the introduction, and the essays by Moradewun Adejunmobi and Ali Behdad extremely useful. Behdad's essay interestingly challenged the postcolonial and cautions misapplication/overabstraction of the term Transnationalism, encouraging a well-grounded historical and political framework of the Transnational.

What is particularly powerful is that this text approaches transnationalism from different disciplines, thus you see how it can be applied in different iterations across historical, musical, linguistic, pedagogical, cinematic, geographical, etc. fields.