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

Françoise Lionnet is Chair of French and Francophone Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Shu-mei Shih is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937.

  

  

  

  

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