The concept of minority for the study of culture

Abstract

Critical tools are needed for navigating the concept of minority and its usefulness for the study of culture. This article reflects on the cultural and political purposes that are served when distinguishing between majorities and minorities, and the various historical and intellectual agendas that have shaped these social practices of classification. It begins by examining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ as an anti-sociological reworking of minor and minority, then turns its attention toward the policy-driven sociological traditions of the Chicago School, and how this has informed the contemporary construction of ‘minorities’ reflected in Australian immigration debates. As a third key paradigm in the study of the ‘minor’, the article revisits cultural studies’ own embrace of the Popular as a site for political struggles over the meanings attached to ‘major’ and ‘minor’ social identities. Finally, we consider the range of transformative cultural practices addressed in this Minor Culture special issue, and reflect on the utility of the minor in holding together disparate political projects. There are a range of ways in which the minor might productively imagine or construct collective identities, in ways that do not anticipate, or even desire, majoritarian endings. It is argued that minoritised social categories do substantive political and cultural work, while acknowledging that numerical descriptions of minorities can hide as much as they reveal.

Notes

1. For example, Supreme Court decisions in the United States. See Appadurai (2006, 62, 63) on the dissenting minority.

2. The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference in December 2015 at the University of Melbourne.

3. On collective action and the liberal individual, see Wolfe (2016).

4. This also anticipates the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, the co-authored second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia that followed Kafka.

5. In the 1910 census, nearly 70% of Chicago comprised of recently arrived European immigrants. See Steinberg (1981, 47).

6. In 2015, the Australian Government increased its overall refugee intake to the highest levels since the Second World War (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2015).

7. For a discussion of this logic in relation to ‘assimilation’ debates, see Hage (2014).

8. An example of this is discussed in Hage (2011).

9. On the affects of ‘happiness’ as a political mediator between majorities and minorities in multicultural discourse, see also Ang (1996).

10. On norms and abnormality, see Stephens (2005).

11. Channel 10 for Australian Idol and Channel Seven for The X Factor, respectively.