Minor Languages, Literatures, and Crafts: Reading Group Sessions 1.3

One of the primary questions that surfaced during our time with Manning and Moten and inside Theaster Gates’ retrospective this: how do we use a language and set of practices that was not meant for us against itself and for our own ends?

We wondered to what extent Gates was effective in this, and we reached for terms and practices and experiences that would help us evaluate his effectiveness. This session will continue that reaching.

Two of the texts suggested in the wake of that conversation begin with language. Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor literature is one a minority constructs within a major language — deterritorializing it from the inside. But the question of who gets to deterritorialize, and from what position, is not as clean as the concept suggests. Rey Chow complicates the picture. When a professor tells her that her clear writing style is a product of colonial education, her facility with the master’s language is read not as skill but as evidence of successful subjection. Chow thinks through the work of Chinua Achebe, who bends English to carry African experience, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who advocates return to indigenous tongues, as she writes about the perpetual interlingualism of the colonized subject, caught between languages that are also indexes of superiority and inferiority.

Then there are the suggested texts by Ariella Azoulay that consider how this works with respect to art and archives. In “Potential History,” Azoulay reconstructs the archival conditions that made the shared world of Arabs and Jews in Palestine before 1948 illegible. And in “Plunder,” she goes further: plunder is not incidental to the formation of modern art but its founding condition.

Session 3: Minor Literatures, Minor Archives

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature — 4 pages · ~1,800 words · ~10 min

Rey Chow, “Not Like a Native Speaker” from Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience — 7 pages · ~2,300 words · ~12 min

Ariella Azoulay, “Potential History: Thinking through Violence” — ~2,700 words · ~15 min

Ariella Azoulay, “Plunder, the Transcendental Condition of Modern Art, and Community of Fabri” — 36 pages · ~12,000 words · ~60 min