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‘What is a Minor Literature?‘,by Deleuze & Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari outline the three characterizing elements of a ‘minor literature’:

1) the deterritorializations of a major language through a minor literature written in the major language from a marginalized or minoritarian position;

Discussing the first element of a ‘minor literature’, Deleuze and Guattari explain that it does not arise from a literature written in a ‘minor’ language, or in a formerly colonized langue.  Rather, a ‘minor literature’ is written in a major language, or as in the case of formerly colonized countries, the colonizers’ langue.  According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”.

2) the thoroughly political nature of a ‘minor literature’;

The second characteristic of a ‘minor literature’, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is its political nature.  Everything
in them is political,” they explain.  The individual is inextricable from the socius, the subject linked to the political: “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.  The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating in it”.

3) and its collective, enunciative value.

This political nature of a ‘minor literature’, then, is inseparable from the third characteristic of a ‘minor literature’, its collective value.