The People Are (Still) Missing: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart and the Problem of Minor Literature Today

Abstract

In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proclaim the ‘productive use of the literary machine’ with the aim to extract from the text its ‘revolutionary force’ – their book on Kafka, in which the concept of minor literature is put forward, is their experiment in doing this. The premise of this article is that Bhanu Kapil’s book-length poem How to Wash a Heart provides an apt point of reference for thinking through the problem of minor literature today. Kapil’s work is part of a significant development within contemporary poetry and poetics, writing informed by and building on postcolonial and feminist critiques of humanism and its encoded whiteness. In the light of Kapil’s work, the three characteristics of minor literature identified by Deleuze and Guattari are examined: the deterritorialisation of language; the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; and the collective assemblage of enunciation.