Abstract

The literature of migration (re)presents radical renegotiations of personal identities and nationalities through “archeological excavations” and “transversal communications” that put in motion the “impure” and hybrid quality of identity. At a more formal level, migration literature emanates from linguistic impurities and heteroglossia, errant perspectives, foreign voices, and foundling, multidimensional and rhizomatic narrative and poetic forms. Sten Pultz Moslund associates the rhizomatic nature of migration texts with “linguistic homelessness,” producing a cacophony of voices and languages (6). Gilles Deleuze’s poetics accumulate an entire vocabulary of geographical and migratory terms, such as root-networks, nomads, movement, speed and lines of flight, territories and borders, in-betweenness and multiplicities. Minor literature is rhizomatic: it involves a linguistic deviance, an impoverished vocabulary, and improper use of grammar; an unadorned, minimalistic style, which turns it into a sign machine that avoids closure, that keeps pushing language to its limits, breaking down signification and multiplying meaning potentials. Minor literature is thus supposed to radically disrupt the purity and homogenising unity of major cultures (2010, 7–8).