Minority, collectivity, and the short story cycle. Identity and difference in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late

Abstract

This essay expands the politics of minor literature that, in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rests on the identification between the individual and the collective, by drawing on the affordances of the genre of the short story cycle. While highlighting the relational dynamics between the minor and the major that underlies Deleuze and Guattari's account, I show how a focus on genre offers the critical tools to articulate the enclosure of community with the pluralities of subjective belonging. The short story (cycle) has often been considered to have close affinities with minor literature due to its fairly low reputation, its interest in marginal characters, and its typical narratives of community. The essay complicates this equation through a discussion of Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late (2019), a series of interconnected stories illuminating the shared struggles of a group of Nigerian migrants in Belgium. While the cycle as a whole conveys a sense of belonging in which linguistic difference provides the very ground of group formation, the individual stories reveal the gaps within the collective and illustrate the ways in which identity and migration are affected by divergent intersectional subject positions marked by class and gender. By examining how political and aesthetic concerns go hand in hand in Unigwe’s short story cycle, the essay argues that minorities’ political struggles for emancipation do not necessarily require internal cohesion, but can also be enhanced through social diversification and multiple literary practices that shift with new contexts of linguistic production and global circulation.

Keywords:

• Migration
• minor literature
• multilingualism
• short story cycle
• Chika Unigwe

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks and to the participants in the international conference “World Literature and the Minor: Figuration, Circulation, Translation” (University of Leuven, 5–7 May 2021) for the enriching discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a detailed critique of Casanova’s notion of “combative literatures,” see Milutinovic (2014).

2 However, “Heart Is Where the Home Is” and “Better Never than Late” introduce characters who are not openly connected to Prosperous and Agu. The titular story, moreover, is set in Nigeria instead of Belgium.

3 The first, shorter version, was published in 2011 in the special issue BabelGium. Onverbiddelijke veeltaligheid of the literary journal DW B (Unigwe 2011). The subsequent, expanded version was published in 2015 in the volume Challenging the Myth of Multilingualism, edited by Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek: [Grant Number 12T5120N].