The aim of this article is to address the limits of the "minor literature" of Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari and Pascale Casanova's "small literature", meanwhile rethink "minor & small literature" as Michel Ragon's "secondary zone literature" from three perspectives. Firstly, it will be argued that "minor and small literature" began to lose its theoretical capacity with the advent of globalization after the new millennium, which is why scholars like Theo D'haen and David Damrosch tended to move away from the initial ideas of Deleuze, Guattari and Casanova. Secondly, the problems of "minor literature" and "small literature" will be updated. There are three problems with "minor literature": 1) D & G's "minor literature"/"littérature mineure" is an incorrect translation of Kafka's work, because Kafka's original word, "klein", means "small" in German; 2) The first feature of "minor literature" that "a minority uses a major language in a context outside that language" runs the risk of not only dismissing all literature written by minorities in "minor languages", but also diminishing the possible meanings of the term, "minority"; and 3) The second and third characteristics of "minor literature", its "political" and "collective" nature, are unable to explain why only non-European arts, such as African American and Soviet literature, are perceived to be political and collective. In terms of "small literature", there are two problems: a) it fails to explain why countries such as China and India, which hardly qualify as 'small', face problems similar to those of "small literature" in the international literary context; and b) it does not have the capacity to explain the literature of minority and marginal groups within a nation or country. Thirdly, "minor and small literature" will be reconsidered as "secondary zone literature", not only in an attempt to emphasize cultural dynamics and power relations based on the visibility of various "minor & small" related literary works, but also to demonstrate that literature may be minor or small, but it always has quantitative implications. Henceforth, in order to solve the limits of "minor and small literature", it is necessary to back to D & G's source term, which is Ragon's "secondary zone literature".
This paper’s core concern is Boris Groys’ theory of the total art of Stalinism, which is devoted to rewriting Soviet art history and reinterpreting Socialist Realism from the perspective of the equal rights between political and artistic Art Power. The aim of this article is to decode Groys and the total art of Stalinism, based on answering the following three questions: 1) why did Groys want to rewrite Soviet art history? 2) How did Groys re-narrate Soviet art history? 3) What are the pros and cons of his reordering of the total art of Stalinism? Groys offers an effective paradigm that could rethink two theoretical genres: a) other Socialist Realisms inside or outside the Soviet bloc, during or after the Soviet era; b) the aesthetical rights of political artworks before, during and after the Cold War, and the historical debates about art, especially about art for art’s sake, or art for political propaganda. However, Groys’ total art of Stalinism and its core theory of the Socialist Realism frame hides some dangers of aestheticizing Stalin and Stalinism.
The two World Wars and the Cold War had a profound impact on Langston Hughes. World War I and the October Revolution wove a web that connected the Soviet Union and its socialist cause to African Americans, and then the Yokinen and Scottsboro trials directly nurtured the “New Red Negro” writings with the spirit of rising “up from bondage” as oppressed people. Hughes traveled the world, became a global citizen, and assumed a cosmopolitan mission for international and racial affairs. However, the Nazi-Soviet Pact changed his view of the world. Hughes began to focus on the problems of “colored soldiers” and compared the advantages and disadvantages of the United States of America and the Soviet Union. When the Iron Curtain came about, McCarthyism drove Hughes to stay in the United States, maintain a distance from international and political affairs, confirm his national position, and rely on writing children’s books for a living, as well as translating and editing others’ works.
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