Problematising Tribality: A Critical Engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories

Tribality simply means the characteristic features of various tribal communities and the qualities of being tribal. In the 1940s leading anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and G.S.Ghurye tried to theorize and categorize tribal identities. However, they were often accused of representing either a ‘protective’ or ‘romantic’ notions of tribality. One cannot determine the tribality of a person based on their features, dialects, food habits or geographical location. Tribality is said to bind the pan-Indian Tribal literature which is again problematic considering language which is considered as the useful indicator of any identity. Tribal Literature is a distinct form of writing to represent people, things and ideas in their cultural authenticities. The tribals essentially have an oral culture and thus when a tribal writer like Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, a Government Doctor by profession, writes in the canonical English language, we will be tempted to probe if he seeks to ‘write in’ or ‘write back’ to the mainstream literary culture; or if his works can fit into the mould of minor literature, thereby making the seemingly personal an intensely political statement. This paper also aims to interrogate issues of tribal identity and their representation through a critical engagement with Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance: Stories (2017).

THEORY OF «MINOR» LITERATURE AND INTERPRETATION OF EPISTOLARY TEXT: CASE OF P. KULISH

The article is devoted to the consideration of P. Kulish's epistolary in the context of «minority» literature. The authors of this theory are J. Deleuze and F. Guattari. Rethinking the key categories of «minor» writing in modern interdisciplinary studies produces a differentiation and refinement of the definitions of «minor»/«small»/«minority» via interpreting various in-between phenomena of literature. Given that in the Ukrainian humanities this theory has not been carefully considered and as a methodological tool has not been updated, the analysis of these works revealed the feasibility of distinguishing concepts derived from the concept of «minor». The main purpose of the study is to reveal the features of Kulish's correspondence through the criteria of minor literature, in particular de(re)territorialization, formation, political semantics. The choice of material is determined by the ambiguity, «encryption» (V. Petrov) of the creative manner, the bilingual nature of the writer's epistolary. The process of self-determination within the Russian epistolary canon affects the nature of language codes. Linguistic transformations in this correspondence, in particular, the mixing of different linguistic elements, have a comedic, parodic character. There is a peripheralization of the dominant n language in terms of social and territorial affiliation. The transmission of Ukrainian pronunciation can be seen not only through the transformation of the Russian epistolary canon, but also as its subversive approach to the creation of a new quality of language in the future.

A City of Betrayals: Irvine Welsh’s Minor Literature of Leith

This article examines the representation of the city and communities of Edinburgh in Irvine Welsh’s works, more specifically his Trainspotting saga: Trainspotting (1993), Porno (2002), Skagboys (2012) and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018). While Welsh is an integral part of a broader literary tradition of the contemporary urban Scottish novel, which blends together the crime novel genre with the localised concerns of post-industrialism, gripping poverty, Thatcherite austerity, substance abuse and nagging questions of Scottish identity (gender, sexuality, class, nationhood, etc.), his depictions of the former port-town of Leith and its forgotten histories exposes Edinburgh as two distinctly separate and striated communities and geographies: one of opportunity and one of betrayal. Specifically, this essay reads Welsh through the literary, spatial and political theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with regard to Leith’s contentious historical relationship with Edinburgh. In this analysis of Welsh’s Leith as a vernacular, rhizomatic and anti-institutional force, this essay hopes to illustrate how Welsh’s work redirects the popular notions of Scottish national identity and statehood toward a minor literature, a linguistic, political and historical divergence from the dominant Scottish literary experience

(English) Dreams versus (Hebrew) Reality: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as ‘Jewish-American Minor Literature’

This article examines Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a particular example of minor literature written in America while suggesting a new term: ‘Jewish-American minor literature’. It has been argued that Jewish-American literature is not minor literature in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms mainly due to the openness of American English to other ethnic languages such as Yiddish.1 However, this article shows that it is Hebrew, and not Yiddish, that functions as ‘minor language’ in the text—both as a language spoken by a minority and according to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, as it undermines the theme of linguistic assimilation governing the surface structure of the book. Yet this ‘subversive’ Hebrew is neither transcribed/transliterated in the text, nor is it referred to or talked about in the novel. Rather, it is ‘hidden’ behind the English lines of the book. In fact, it is the emerging of such ‘concealed’ Hebrew hollowing out the idea of Americanisation in the text that turns Call It Sleep into what I call ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.2 Inviting further research, this article may open the door for a new research field investigating (whether there are any) other appearances of covert Hebrew words in additional Jewish-American works written exclusively in English and whether these works too can be considered as ‘Jewish-American minor literature’.

Book Review: Bulgarian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mihaela P. Harper and Dimitar Kambourov (Review Essay)

The essay reviews a recent collection of seminal critical readings of Bulgarian literature as “world literature.” Published by Bloomsbury Academic, the volume under discussion contributes to the study of the dynamic interaction of “minor” literatures with local, regional, and wider manifestations of global literary space. It is organized in four sections of thematic contributions authored by scholars from Bulgaria and beyond that discuss historical, geographical, economic, and genetic processes in the development of Bulgarian literature. The review follows the sections closely, and is attentive to specific phenomena, positions, texts, and contexts that render the concept of “minor literature” negotiable and open to reformulations. As most of the static labels are nowadays flushed into the conglomerate of “marginocentricity” and the reality of “quality literature” is no longer a criterion in the admission of local literatures to worldwide prominence, literary circulation has, to a great extent, become a function of the global market. The publication of the reviewed volume is the outcome of a vigorous effort to establish Bulgaria’s literary location within these processes and beyond them.

Romani Literature(s) As Minor Literature(s) in the Context of World Literature: A Survey of Romani Literatures in French and Spanish

The article discusses the comparatively young form of written Romani literary self-expression as an example of “minor literature” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.[1] The focus here is on producing a classifying survey of the literary production of Romani writers in France and Spain, with the article outlining the different aesthetic fields and literary forms evident in French and Spanish Romani literature. The comparative approach reveals thatdespite regional and national differences, these minor literatures demonstrate several aesthetic similarities typical of Romani literature that could ultimately come to define the transnational, cross-border characteristics of Romani literature. Furthermore, I show that there are literary tendencies in contemporary Romani literatures that go beyond the usual forms of establishing literary self-expression in diasporic cultural productions or aesthetic appropriation of major society’s literary traditions, so that Romani literatures in French and Spanish should, I argue, also be seen as part of world literature. 1 It is important to emphasize that the potentially offending implications of the evaluative use of the term “minor” is by no means hinted at in Deleuze and Guattari: The French “literature mineure” does not indicate lower aesthetic qualities or literary inferiority to majority literature but rather describes a literature produced by writers not (exclusively) belonging to the nation-state in which they live. At the same time, it should be mentioned that the term “small literature,” in contrast to minor literatures, means literary expressions from small nations or/and in small languages like, for example, in Bulgarian, Estonian, or Luxembourgish (cf., Glesener 2012).