Entre majorations ambiguës et minorations créatrices : la traduction des épopées orales d’Afrique et d’Asie en langues occidentales Claudine Le Blanc Sémantique du mineur Le terme « mineur » est affecté en français—et dans les autres langues ayant hérité du comparatif latin—d’une redoutable plasticité. S’appliquant aussi bien à un individu jeune destiné, sauf accident, à devenir majeur, qu’à un mode musical construit par altération à partir du majeur, il se fait volontiers ambigu et labile, à l’image de ce qu’il désigne, tantôt état doué de devenir, tantôt produit fixé d’un devenir passé. C’est cette relativité qu’ont exploitée Deleuze et Guattari dans leur concept de « littérature mineure », utilisé depuis la fin des années 1970, conformément à la définition donnée par ses auteurs, pour désigner la littérature « qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure » (29). Le terme est cependant venu à être appliqué aussi, de façon extensive et sans doute révélatrice des efforts menés depuis une vingtaine d’années pour penser la mondialisation de la littérature, à une littérature dans une langue mineure, éventuellement traduite dans une langue majeure. Deleuze et Guattari, qui sémantisent de façon originale et quelque peu provocante l’expression « littérature mineure » au début du troisième chapitre de Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, ne visaient toutefois pas des langues ou des littératures qui seraient mineures par essence ou en raison d’un état de fait, mais des usages et plus encore des processus de minoration que, loin de vouloir empêcher, ils souhaitaient valoriser en ce qu’ils bousculent les fonctions du langage dans une langue donnée : Se servir du polylinguisme dans sa propre langue, faire de celle-ci un usage mineur ou intensif, opposer le caractère opprimé de cette langue à son caractère oppresseur, trouver les points de non-culture et de sous-développement, les zones de tiers-monde linguistiques par où une langue s’échappe, un animal se greffe, un agencement se branche. Combien de styles, ou de genres, ou de mouvements littéraires, même tout petits, n’ont [End Page 123] qu’un rêve : remplir une fonction majeure du langage, faire des offres de service comme langue d’État, langue officielle ? […] Faire le rêve contraire ; savoir créer un devenirmineur. (49–50) Au sein de la littérature mondiale, comprise comme canon aussi bien que comme ensemble des circulations littéraires, soumis l’un comme l’autre à un régime de compétition (Casanova), l’aspiration au majeur reste pourtant la règle, non seulement pour la plupart des productions littéraires, mais aussi dans le discours critique et académique qui s’y attache, en particulier lorsqu’il s’agit de littérature ressentie comme minorisée, qui se réclamera alors volontiers de la « littérature mineure ». Ce contresens apparent dans l’usage de la notion de littérature mineure n’est peut-être toutefois que la réplique de la distorsion que les deux philosophes français ont fait subir aux propos de Kafka dans son Journal à la date du 25 décembre 1911, qui portaient bien sur des « petites littératures » (kleine Literaturen, « littératures mineures » dans la traduction française de Marthe Robert), à savoir la littérature juive de Varsovie et la littérature tchèque (Casanova 287; Gauvin). Faut-il dès lors abandonner un concept aussi équivoque ? Certains le suggèrent, et le font (Khair). Dans la pratique, on note que les critiques qui l’utilisent aujourd’hui ont tendance à n’en retenir qu’un aspect, « la déterritorialisation, la dimension collective et la dimension politique » plutôt que la dimension linguistique (Garnier 7) ou, au contraire, le principe de « l’action d’une minorité dans une langue majeure » et non « les caractéristiques telles qu’elles ont été définies par Deleuze et Guattari (branchement sur l’immédiat-politique, agencement collectif d’énonciation et déterritorialisation de la langue) » (Santini). Ressaisi, ainsi que l’entendaient Deleuze et Guattari, comme processus, le concept de littérature mineure garde...

Introduction* Núria Codina Solà Maps of World Literature Since its emergence in the 1990s as a field of research in its own right, world literature has typically been studied through maps. Cartography, Francesca Orsini points out, “seems more generally to be the first technology to which literary scholars reach out when they seek to spatialize literature” (349), especially in the case of those texts that span different countries and are characterized by global circulation. Mapping has been used as a metaphor to locate the power relations between major and minor literatures in the world literary system or as a visual tool to trace the unidirectional movements from the centres of production in Western Europe, which determine the literary norm, to the literary periphery, which is typically located on the linguistic margins of Europe or outside the Western world and is characterized by aesthetic derivation and institutional dependence. In his influential book What Is World Literature? (2003), David Damrosch describes world literature as “maps in motion,” a phrase that he borrows from Vinay Dharwadker to illustrate the “shifting relations both of literary history and cultural power” (24). While Damrosch proposes a dynamic approach to world literature, based on how a work circulates and is read beyond its point of origin at a given time, the use of the map as a metaphor is significant, since it presupposes an overarching portrayal of space that reflects Western “ideas about representation and reality emphasizing an ‘all seeing’ perspective, a fixed scale, and mathematical [End Page 5] projection from sphere to developable surface” (Pearce 17). Even though Damrosch is aware of the specific US-American perspective from which he writes (28), “[t]his account has so far implied that the early post-millennial career of world literature occurred largely in and around Anglophone, North-American academic contexts” (Helgesson and Vermeulen 7), with the result that the Anglophone has often been equated with the world (cf. Gunaratne). Dominant theories of world literature often overlook those literary texts whose trajectories and relationships take place on a non-Western, regional level or on the margins of the literary market. In his later essay “Where Is World Literature?” (2012), Damrosch offers a more critical discussion of the possibilities of cartographic representation: “To achieve a full understanding of where world literature is,” he argues, “we also need to see where it isn’t, and why” (219; emphasis in original), pointing to the blind spots on world literary maps and the importance of local levels of circulation that often remain unseen. When critiquing the broad patterns employed to describe the spatial scope of literary works, Damrosch challenges Franco Moretti’s method of distant reading, which turns to maps, graphs, and evolutionary trees to offer a systematic view of the world literary system—a form of mapping that, according to Damrosch, needs to be complemented with close readings of regional dynamics and individual works in order to “see both the forest and the trees, both the wave and the drops of water, both what is and what could be” (“Where” 220). Indeed, in his sociological approach to literary history inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory, Moretti sees world literature as a “system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (55–56; emphasis in original). This form of mapping assumes rigid and readymade boundaries between the different national literatures and parts of the world, which can be cast in fixed roles and positions. Using a necessarily limited and biased sample of data, a limitation that Moretti acknowledges when he writes that “[r]eading ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution” (55), distant reading is reminiscent of traditional mapping procedures in which the ordering of spatial knowledge aims at making the world’s geographical complexity and mutability manageable: “Through statistical and graphic generalization, the features of the map are categorized into the hierarchies of quantitative and qualitative data; division of features into points, lines, and areas; and assignment of categories to symbolization through size, arrangement, and texture” (Pearce 18). Moretti’s focus on empirical maps, along...

Reviewed by: Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic by Alexandra Perisic A. Atinuke Irele Alexandra Perisic. Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic. The Ohio State UP, 2019. Pp. 240. US$99.95 hardcover, US$29.95 paperback, US$29.95 ebook. "The regional and the global are not necessarily in opposition but rather supplement one another" (177), Alexandra Perisic argues in Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic, a comparative transnational examination of migrant narratives. Perisic deliberately traverses linguistic traditions with her work in order to outline an argument for the multipodal and multifaceted function of the Atlantic Ocean within global neoliberal relations. Arguing comparative literature methodologies allow us to fully embrace the effects of what she terms "global neoliberalization," Perisic urges comparatists to resist the impulse to begin study of neoliberalism from the dominant countries, rather pondering, "would global neoliberalization generate equal enthusiasm if the story were told from the perspective of the Global South?" (2). An insistence on shifting the perspective from which we consider immigration allows Perisic, and us, to consider the conditions that shape global precarity as a state of existence that ties different subjects to one another despite colonial relations and legacies, national borders, and linguistic communities. Indeed, Perisic argues for using "precarity as a conceptual framework" in such a way that allows us to "account for the growing inequalities within the precariat itself" (12). In other words, the contemporary neoliberal world order has created a precarious class, the contours of which become much more clearly apparent when we allow ourselves to observe and analyze comparatively. There are multiple points from which Perisic's work departs: neoliberalism (or, more aptly, neoliberalization), migration, postcolonialism, and the Atlantic Ocean. Perisic insists that adopting a comparative approach that observes works written across multiple languages—in this case, French, Spanish, and English—combats the "neoliberal governance [that] mobilizes racialized and gendered modes of marginalization to prevent solidarity between groups" (3), positioning them in opposition to one another despite their shared precarity at the hands of transnational neoliberal markets, policies, and institutions. The comparative approach, thus, draws connections between conditions for migration via the perpetually significant Atlantic Ocean, without ignoring or attempting to flatten the differences and particularities that propel individuals from their points of origin. Literature is a useful vehicle for this analysis, not simply because it holds a looking glass to contemporary societies, but also because it theorizes and opens up space for new concepts and frameworks that can be used to analyze, and to resist, the contemporary neoliberal landscape. Perisic's emphasis on "global neoliberalization" as a process through which to understand the shift in contemporary immigrant literature is more convincing than her argument about the centrality of the Atlantic Ocean. Drawing connections to her [End Page 468] own experience reading migrant Bildungsroman as a young immigrant in France herself, Perisic deliberately pivots discourse about migrants from debates about identity, belonging, and nationalism. Rather, Precarious Crossings urges us to think about systemic connections between themes raised in novels that depict immigrants' journeys and lives before, during, and after their displacement from their countries of origin: "Contemporary trans-Atlantic immigrant fictions require a theoretical framework that extends beyond an analysis of the representation and self-representation of immigrants within a national setting" (14). Instead of analyzing the experience of the migrants upon arrival in their new host/home countries, Perisic calls for a shift to reading the causes and underlying themes that preempt, spur, and facilitate the movement in the first place. Thus, the immigrant experiences portrayed in the novels Perisic selects point to global economic systems that order social, personal, and eventually, national affiliations. Furthermore, they allow us to finally pay attention to migration patterns that move beyond, or even eschew, colonial ties while drawing postcolonial connections to twenty-first-century neocolonial or neoimperial capitalistic dominance. Shifting the approach in this way brings the United States into the discussion differently and accounts for the contemporary conditions that unite various populations into global precarity while also calling attention to regional, national, and cultural specificities. The chapters in Precarious Crossings take on thematic similarities between texts from a wide range of countries and settings: the contemporary circulation...