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Deleuze and Guattari list out three characteristics of a minor literature—it is written in a major language from a marginalized position; its nature is thoroughly political; and it has a collective value. Yet, as this article shows by taking the case of T.S. Pillai’s Malayalam novel Chemmeen (1956) and its various afterlives, world literatures illuminate greater varieties of scale and of characteristics than can readily be covered by a single binary opposition between minor versus major, local versus global, original versus translation, singular versus plural. The concept of ultraminor literature, especially in the South Asian context, thus gives us a chance to engage with an undefined space that archives historical, translational, political, linguistic, idiosyncratic, and aesthetic tales of a text within and outside its tradition.
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Abstract
This essay proposes a comparative approach for engaging with Anglophone world literature by focusing on post-millennial literatures of India. The reason for focusing on India is threefold. First, India is a multilingual space where translations and comparativisms are central to conceptualizing any literature. Second, Anglo-American postcolonial theory has been heavily based on Anglophone literature about or from India, and it has largely ignored the literatures of other Indian languages, creating a gap between praxis and theory within the literatures of India. Finally, the concept of the “Anglophone” and the “world” in the Indian context is multidimensional, informed by class as well as caste, where centre–periphery, local–global, universal–particular, diaspora–native, individual–collective frameworks become reductive. The two novels that follow in this essay indicate that the paradigm for analysing Anglophone world literature has to be comparative, translational, provincial, multilingual, and worldly.
Author:
Abstract
Deleuze and Guattari list out three characteristics of a minor literature—it is written in a major language from a marginalized position; its nature is thoroughly political; and it has a collective value. Yet, as this article shows by taking the case of T.S. Pillai’s Malayalam novel Chemmeen (1956) and its various afterlives, world literatures illuminate greater varieties of scale and of characteristics than can readily be covered by a single binary opposition between minor versus major, local versus global, original versus translation, singular versus plural. The concept of ultraminor literature, especially in the South Asian context, thus gives us a chance to engage with an undefined space that archives historical, translational, political, linguistic, idiosyncratic, and aesthetic tales of a text within and outside its tradition.
What is the role of literature in our global landscape today? How do local authors respond to the growing worldwide power of English and the persisting effects of the colonial systems that paved the way for globalization today? These questions have often been approached very differently by postcolonialists and by students of world literature, but over the past two decades, a developing dialogue between these divergent approaches has produced robust scholarship and sometimes fractious debate, as issues of language, politics, and cultural difference have come to the fore. Drawing on a wide variety of cases, from medieval Wales to contemporary Syria and Australia, and on works written in Arabic, Basque, English, Hindi, and more, this collection explores the mutual illumination that can be gained through the interaction of postcolonial and world literary perspectives.
What is the role of literature in our global landscape today? How do local authors respond to the growing worldwide power of English and the persisting effects of the colonial systems that paved the way for globalization today? These questions have often been approached very differently by postcolonialists and by students of world literature, but over the past two decades, a developing dialogue between these divergent approaches has produced robust scholarship and sometimes fractious debate, as issues of language, politics, and cultural difference have come to the fore. Drawing on a wide variety of cases, from medieval Wales to contemporary Syria and Australia, and on works written in Arabic, Basque, English, Hindi, and more, this collection explores the mutual illumination that can be gained through the interaction of postcolonial and world literary perspectives.