Summary
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, applied to Anton Shammas’ Arabesques following Hannan Hever (1987), for literature written in a majority language by a member of a subordinate minority group, in which everything is political and everything has collective value (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.148).
Details
- Deleuze and Guattari assert that in works of ‘minor literature’ ‘literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation [… it can] express another possible community’ (1986, 17–18, quoted PDF p.148).
- Hever’s claim that Arabesques seeks to ‘deterritorialize’ Hebrew has led critics to associate the novel with an anti- or post-nationalist politics; Hever’s own reading, which Bernard follows, continues to a reterritorialization of Hebrew ‘as the language of the Israeli’ (Hever, 1987, 70, quoted PDF p.148) through the novel’s syncretizing arabesque structure.
- Bernard uses the concept within her claim that Arabesques is neither anti-national nor anti-allegorical but a self-conscious engagement with National allegory as a reading and writing practice, projecting the book’s most radical Demographic imaginary (PDF p.149-150).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Anton Shammas, Hannan Hever, National allegory, Demographic imaginary