Description of Research Program Vision Statement
The Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group is an interdisciplinary community of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences from throughout the University of California system. Our common purpose is to collaborate on the study of minority discourse across national boundaries (transnational) with attention to colonial and neocolonial processes (transcolonial). Our immediate research goal is to publish a series of books that will reformulate minority discourse from a comparative perspective informed by a consideration of transnational and transcolonial processes (see the definitions of these terms in "Research Program Description" below). The core group of 30 members plans to: meet regularly and hold workshops and conferences; mentor graduate students with an aim to help publish their work; invite outside speakers (nationally and internationally known scholars in minority discourse as well as minority cultural producers such as artists and writers) to enrich our comparative approach; and finally, aid in pedagogical transformations in high schools and universities so as to encourage curricular changes that reflect the demographic diversity in California. We also plan to create an electronic archive of materials on minority discourse on our website to serve as a resource center for scholars, teachers, and students. Ultimately, our institutional goal is to create a Center for Transnational and Transcolonial Studies that provides linkages among area studies and ethnic studies centers, as well as humanities and social science departments where the focus is often predominantly mainstream (majority discourse) or bounded by one discipline, one nation, one culture, or one language. The Center will organize research and publication, promote pedagogical development, and coordinate related research efforts at the University of California.
Our broad primary goal is to foster an intellectual environment conducive to excellence in an area of interdisciplinary research that is particularly well suited to the regional specificities of the University of California. As a comparative minority discourse project that examines minor cultural formations in the world, it combines cultural diversity with minority discourse, thus aiming to reflect the diversity of California's population (both domestic and immigrant) and institute such diversity as a pedagogical and research priority. What distinguishes our research group from other minority discourse centers and programs is our aim to promote dialogues among various minority discourse scholars working in different national areas and reverse the balkanization of area-related political interests. We will pursue this aim through the development of a minority discourse paradigm that includes the world at large, and that examines similarities and differences among different minority discourses with the aid of theoretical perspectives. Our goals will be achieved through the following activities:
(2) Hold annual or biannual international conferences inclusive of core members and outside invitees who are nationally and internationally known scholars of minority discourse. The conference will travel from UCLA to locations throughout the UC system. (3) Publish anthologies of papers of the core members (and those outside members whose work fits best with the project's stated methodology). The first anthology is tentatively entitled Minor Transnationalisms, the topic of the 2001 conference (see "Events"). Cornell University Press and University of Minnesota Press have already expressed interest in publishing this anthology. (4) Mentor graduate students and advise them on the production of research papers on minority discourse with an aim towards publication either in the research group's anthologies or peer-reviewed journals. We will also run a writing competition with a cash prize for the best research paper in comparative minority discourse (see "Events"). (5) Expand the current website and create an electronic archive of materials that can be used as a resource by scholars and students of comparative minority discourse. (6) Help transform pedagogy in high schools by teaching outreach courses on minority discourse for LAUSD high school teachers. The project directors will organize a lecture series in the near future. (7) Establish a Center for Transnational and Transcolonial Studies that will continue all the above efforts with an aim to institutionalize research and pedagogical transformations that reflect the cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of the University of California system.
Detailed Description of Research Program The European nations of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, and the Asian nations of China and Japan, along with the United States, all have a history of colonial and imperial domination. As a result, their cultures, literatures, and languages have reached peoples and nations far beyond their borders. Today, cultural activity around the world bears the traces of this history, rendering a rich body of cultural texts (literature, film, art, historiography, etc.) for postcolonial analysis. Postcolonial cultural texts in effect constitute minority discourse in so far as they are written or represented in the majority language of the colonizers (following the definition of minority discourse of Deleuze and Guattari). This is perhaps the most obvious in the literary field, with the emergence of such renowned writers as Leopold Sedar Senghor (Francophone), Gabriel Garc'a Marquez (Hispanophone), and Wole Soyinka (Anglophone), among others, who write in the languages of their colonizers. To date, the postcolonial paradigm has been the only one available to frame the study of colonial and postcolonial cultures, but it is insufficient in many respects. Postcolonial cultural studies has been overly concerned with a vertical analysis confined to one nation-state, such as the effect of British colonialism in India where the vertical power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is the main object of analysis. In contradistinction, we propose a horizontal approach that brings postcolonial minor cultural formations across national boundaries into productive comparisons. We propose comparative postcolonial studies of minor cultures, which we call transcolonial studies of minority discourse. Paralleling the rise of postcolonial writers in various countries, immigrant and minority cultural producers residing in imperial and metropolitan centers have been transforming the traditions of former colonizing powers as well as those of their ethnic cultures. In many metropolitan centers, it is minority cultural producers who exhibit the most vibrant creative energy today, playing various pivotal roles as writers, artists, academics, and film makers. For instance, writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston (Chinese) in the U.S., Calixthe Beyala (Cameroonian) in France and Yi Yang-ji (Korean) in Japan are reshaping the canons of literature in their respective countries. Even though minority discourse is most often intercultural and multilingual, most minority discourse analysis has resorted to a strictly national paradigm mainly because the minority is defined against the majority as the locus of resistance and empowerment in a national community of unequal relations. To open up the narrow national focus and shed the national obsession through a comparative examination of minority cultural formation across national boundaries, we will not only bring out the interculturality of a given minority discourse, but will also provide a forum for coalition among various minority discourses. A productive comparison of French republicanism and U.S. multiculturalism, will, for instance, help chart the trajectory of a transnationalism constituted by minority cultures in active relationship with each other. This is what we mean by transnational studies of minority discourse. What possibilities and potentialities does a transcolonial and transnational cultural studies of minority discourse promise? As nation-states wane as meaningful categories of citizenship, subjecthood, and identity, the transcolonial and transnational pursuits of minority cultures may indeed foreshadow the ways of identification to come for various peoples across metropolitan and postcolonial terrains. Minority cultures may yet be the most cosmopolitan of all cultures precisely because they bear the traces of multiple national cultures due to colonialism abroad and at home, and more recently, to global neocolonialism. A sustained investigation of minority discourse in terms of transcolonial and transnational processes can lead to a dramatic reformulation of conventional national categories that undergird the disciplinary divisions within the humanities and social sciences, a blurring of the rigid distinction between area studies and ethnic studies, and a transnationalization of language and literature departments traditionally organized by national languages. Changing the name of the French Department to the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA, an effort led by project co-director Lionnet, is an immediate institutional and disciplinary transformation that a transcolonial and transnational approach makes possible. Our research group seeks to build upon the University of California Humanities Research Institutes (UCHRI) three-year initiative on minority discourse (1990-93). The UCHRI initiative focused primarily on literatures written in English within the bounds of the U.S. nation. Our project aims at opening up this investigation to a more global and multilingual approach to cultural diversity across a broad range of regional and national territories. We hope to collaborate with UCHRI in the future to hold either resident seminars or organize conferences. Methodologically, the most important factor integrating the works of the project participants in our research group is our shared interest in the theoretical dimensions of minority discourse. This interest will prevent the research from becoming merely a set of case studies or a compilation of data. Through shared readings of key texts of minority discourse, such as Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature and The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse which the members read for the May 2000 workshop, we will strengthen our methodological coherence. Following are a set of topics that we will investigate in our collective work in the years to come. Some of these topics will be developed into major conferences and anthologies.
2. The relationship between area studies and ethnic studies: a topic that is of interest to a broad section of scholars but to date not yet adequately discussed or analyzed. 3. Melancholia and minority discourse: analysis of the frequent use of the psychoanalytic notion of melancholia in the discussion of minority cultural production. Is minority culture necessarily a product of melancholia, as some claim? 4. Theorizing minoritization: a comparative study of the different discourses by which a person becomes minoritized within a location; a comparison of U.S. multiculturalism, French Republicanism, British and Japanese multiculturalism, Chinese multiethnicism, etc. 5. Translation and minority discourse: An examination of the ways in which minority cultures translate majority languages/modes for their own political and aesthetic purposes. 6. The politics of literacy and discipline: an analysis of how minority populations acquire literacy, and what disciplinary mechanisms are at play in the process of this acquisition. 7. Globalization and minority discourse: An exploration of the effects of globalization on minority discourse, including the unsettling of majority-minority relationships.
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