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Reviewed by:
  • Minor Transnationalism ed. by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih
  • Elleke Boehmer
Minor Transnationalism. Edited by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih. Durham N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Following the pathbreaking work of Catherine Hall, Paul Gilroy and others on globalization past and present it is not too far-fetched to claim that the postcolonial – and colonial - world picture increasingly appears as less of a binary system, diligently maintained as such by imperial forces, than as an interconnected terrain. Where once Centre and Periphery dominated, now, whether we consider historical, social or cultural studies, the focus is on multiple gangliar, “rhizomic” and “dendritic” interactions and exchanges, including those between minority networks of migrant workers and others, which neatly short circuit the former uber-dominant metropolises of the globe.

Edited by two highly regarded cultural critics of such transnational phenomena, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Minor Transnationalisms, as its precise and unqualified title immediately suggests, forms a decisive and also variegated contribution to this corpus of scholarship, and seeks to push it in to date unexplored directions. The collection brings together a range of carefully researched studies of inter-national formations – of the cultural politics of racial murder in Paris in the era of Josephine Baker (Tyler Stovall), of the social and multicultural determinations of dancehall in 1980s Jamaica (Jenny Sharpe), of ways of reading Mauritian Dev Virahsawmy’s creolized work (Lionnet herself), as well as theoretical considerations of what a “minor” epistemology and politics in a transnational context might entail (Ali Behdad, Susan Koshy, inter alia ). As this suggests, the key question which the book taken as a whole confronts is whether the ‘borderless’ processes of globalization which impact on communities both dominant and subaltern, have produced “minor” forms of interaction and mobilization which are not merely complicit with western expansionism. How does our understanding of the mobility of labour, of the vernacular, of migrant economies, and so on, calibrate when we view the global order with reference to non-western temporalities and modernities? The minor, cast in these terms of transnationalism and cross-border trafficking, would thus signify, at least ideally, lateral yet transborder connections between minorities who are, significantly, defined vis-à-vis one another.

The genesis of Minor Transnationalism, as the editors narrate in their introduction, came out of their mutual sense, as “transnationals” based in the conformist United States, that not only their identities but their forms of scholarship were consistently mediated by ‘major’ discourses and subjectivites. “Transnationals,” who might according to a longer established yet somewhat anachronistic vocabulary also be named postcolonialists, were missing the opportunity seemingly offered by contemporary globalization, however west-based, to “link spaces and struggles laterally” (3). In other words, Lionnet and Shih are animated by what might be called an updated (and more globalized) version of the postcolonial, where the accent is less on the empires of the past, equally on migration and the hybrid, and more on lateral and transcolonial axes of comparison. The project therefore is optimistic, and the efforts of all the contributors do much to draw attention to the multiple specificities of the transnational, the pain and discomfort (not only Rushdiesque irreverence) of the hybrid, and the heuristic richness of the minor. Yet despite this optimism and energy, a worry implicit throughout the collection, not least for the contributors, is that by downgrading the focus on empire and the nation-state, and increasing the emphasis on the (itself highly marketable) trans-border perspective, the theoretical purchase of resistance “from below” is etiolated also. Or, as Jenny Sharpe puts it succinctly in a critique of Gilroy, any “theory of diaspora that follows a cartography of corporate globalization risks reproducing its structures of power and knowledge” (263).

Another way of articulating this at once epistemological and political concern is by way of the observation that Minor Transnationalism, the collection, has some difficulty with pinpointing what at the end of the day constitutes a minor transnationalism. The concept is in fact configured at a number of different discursive levels across the book. Here it relates to actual links and collaborations between minorities, even to a “transcolonial” intertextuality; there it involves a form of theoretical...

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