Author-Audience Politics in Minority Literature (Hybrid Panel, 58th NeMLA Conventi, Newport, RI)

58th NeMLA Convention

Newport, RI |  March 6–9, 2027 

Hybrid Panel: "Author-Audience Politics in Minority Literature"

Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s definition of minor literature extends beyond the literature of a minority language to the literature a minority writes in a dominant tongue, a literature in which language is deterritorialized, the individual is immediately political, and everything takes on collective value. This definition raises a question that requires critical attention: who reads minor literature, and how does it make itself legible, or deliberately illegible, to its audience?

This panel examines the descriptive and narrative strategies that minority writers deploy to negotiate a doubled audience: the insider community whose lived reality is being represented, and the outsider reader who arrives without a map. Central among these strategies is code-switching, which functions as a stylistic texture and as a political act of audience construction. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari alongside Gloria Anzaldúa's theorization of languaging and Geneva Smitherman's work on African American linguistic politics, I argue that to switch codes within a dominant-language text is to address the insider reader in a language of belonging simultaneously and to confront the outsider reader with the limits of their comprehension, enacting, at the level of form, the social asymmetries the text describes.

Code-switching is one instrument within broader descriptive grammar: untranslated language, hyperspecific local geography, embodied cultural ritual, and the strategic withholding of explanation all work to position the outsider reader as a tourist and as a learner. Rather than failures of assimilation, these strategies are instruments of empowerment: ways minority writers claim ownership of their representational worlds and, by the same gesture, define the conditions of entry into them.

I invite scholars with papers that engage with the politics of belonging, the politics of language, and the politics of transaction that structure the relationship between minority writers, their communities, and their readers, and that together constitute the emancipatory work of minor literature.

Upload your Abstract on the NeMLA website https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22382.  

Send in your questions on patience.odeh@uconn.edu