ABSTRACT
Non-hegemonic cultures are viewed primarily in dominant discourses of comparative studies through their marginal relations to centres of power. Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet characterise this as a “Foucauldian overemphasis on the capillary operation of power of the dominant” which creates a “vertical model from which horizontal communication amongst minorities is made invisible” (Shih and Lionnet 7). In their perspective, responsible cultural historians must account for such “lateral” relationships between “peripheral” nations and their cultures, as they are frequently rendered invisible in dominant narratives of the globe. The mapping of the historical fact of these alternate vectors, which Shih and Lionnet term “minor transnationalism”, thus complicates worldviews organised on centre-margin models. Interruptions in simplistic yet highly strategic mappings 1 of world literature give opportunities both to interrogate the epistemological project of knowing a global phenomenon and to better understand how ideology itself determines that large-scale knowledge.
