Rethinking the discourse of ‘marginality’ in English literary studies and the social sciences: M. NourbeSe Philip’s ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite a series of critiques concerning its validity as a tool of socio-political analysis, the notion of ‘marginality’ continues to play a role in a range of important global debates. This article offers an overview of these debates, proceeding from the contention that the question of ‘margin’ has in fact played an enduring (if not indeed constitutive) role in the institutionalisation of the social sciences and English literary studies as areas of academic inquiry. While such a claim enables the article to rethink that series of methodological ‘shifts’ that is often assumed to have structured the history of English literary studies, it also considers the ways in which M. NourbeSe Philip’s 1989 text, ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’, might help us to rethink the notion of ‘marginality’ itself (that is, not so much as a kind of ‘framework’ than as the dynamic product of an ideological exchange between those more or less ‘central’ and ‘marginal’ elements of a given interpretive situation). Insofar as such a dynamic might also be seen to inform understandings of the wider paradigm of ‘modernity’, the article concludes with a consideration of its implications in relation to intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and the university institution in general.