Ministry of Higher

Education and Scientific

Research
---------------------University of Kairouan
--------------------Faculty of Letters and
Human Sciences

Research
Group on
Prejudicial
Narratives

The Research Group on Prejudicial Narratives

(RGPN) at the Faculty of Letters and Human
Sciences in Kairouan announces a postgraduate
study day on:

(De)Minoritization
Venue: Conference Room
Thursday April 21st , 2016

Call for Papers

The organizers of the first RGPN study day are
pleased to invite submissions on aspects of
minoritization/deminoritization in language,
culture, ethnicity, religion, and politics. This will
be a forum for both instructors and
postgraduate students to discuss the latest
scholarship on the issue.

deminoritization.weebly.com

_______________________________
Cultural theorists engaged in the re-writing of oppressive narratives in
Western societies have in recent years applied subjectivities that, albeit
epistemically dubitable for many critics, interrogate the authority of mainline
positivist accounts of the realities of subalternity and subordination. These
uncontrolled subjectivities create opportunities for the minor to achieve visibility
by challenging the established structures of power and privilege. In the Deleuzian
affective typology, becoming-minor transforms the subject into a generative
system of embodiment, a nomad of the steppes. In Anzaldan feminist
philosophy, being minor is one and the same as a serpents tongue that is capable
of cracking and fracturing the gender and class matrices of signification and
symbolism (L. Irigaray) in Western societies.
Stressing the radical precariousness of minority existence, theorists of
vulnerability, such as Martha Nussbaum and Joan Tronto, argue for a new
conception of human dignity and social justice that capitalizes on the potential
power of individual transformative militancy rather than on identity-based group
struggle. In this context, deminoritization so termed by its attempt at removing
minority status (S. Lee), can be described as a result-oriented strategy of
1

liberation which has its roots in the realm of individual purposive action, one that
takes pride in its dynamic inimicality to political indoctrination. Questioning
identity and identification may therefore entail the creation of a minority
discourse that typically refuses to lend itself to the archetypal classification of
social groups along parameters determined by physical ability (or disability),
sexual orientation, and ethnic, religious or language-group affiliation.
_______________________________________
Abstracts should be submitted to <snighaoui@gmail.com> not later than April 5,
2016.
For further details and registration, please visit <deminoritization.weebly.com>