World Literature and the Production of the Minor: Introduction

Abstract

"This special issue joins [a] burgeoning self-critical turn in the discipline and engages with the institutionalization of minor texts in world literature, demonstrating that minority is a provisional identity produced through mapping practices that include academic discourses, translation choices, reading modes, and publishing strategies. Instead of offering counter-mappings with a specific geographical focus, as Orsini’s, Helgesson’s, or Roig-Sanz’s projects commendably do, or taking maps as objective representations of the world literary system, as is the case with dominant accounts in the field, this volume asks rather by whom, how, and where world
literature cartographies are made, and how we can rewrite the legend and learn to reread the map. Drawing on critical cartography and human geography’s emphasis on narrative mappings and embodied trajectories, the special issue examines what strategies writers and other institutional agents use to inscribe minor literatures in the material acts of mapping, translating, and publishing. The goal is to situate world literature’s traditional mapping of minor literatures in the periphery of the literary field within 'a specific set of power-knowledge claims' (Crampton and Krygier 12). Rather than seeing them as immobile scholarly or textual realities, the focus on production highlights the process of making instead of the stable identity of the product."