Minor Re-visions

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To break the literacy tensions between the “racially others” (minority) and the dominant American culture (majority), Morris Young in his “Minor Re/Visions” speaks out the need for literacy narratives to correct the existing ideological constructions on literacy and race. As part of the minority, Young shared his own stories of being prejudiced based on his color and accent despite his U.S. citizenship and high literacy credentials.
Young proposes “minor re/vision” as the answer to this struggle. As the term itself suggests, minor re/vision is an irony to the “major revisions” in the American culture, specifically the way the White race must change their view toward the colored people’s literacy, culture, and citizenship (Young, 7). It is the process of using literacy narratives to make its way to the dominant discourses of literacy and race to start a political action and to establish a set of expectations about the minority by exposing their collective literacy narratives.
For Young, literacy narratives play important roles for the minority to navigate the relationships between literacy, culture, and citizenship as they live in the mainstream culture. According to Harvey Graff, acquiring literacy validates one in the American culture because of the latter values the rags-to-riches stories. Through Young’s proposal of minor personal and public re/visions, the minority have the means to define who they are and what they want to become in society (Young, 26).

Once they become known in the mainstream culture, these literacy stories become the documents or proclamations of their progress which then reinforce the ideologies of the nation and pave the way to democracy as mentioned by Cathy Davidson. Exposing their literacy stories provides a sense of belonging to an indifferent environment. The minority, based on Richard Hoggart, can finally feel their legitimate citizenship because they attain material wealth and social status through hard work. Literary narratives serve to be an important tool to bring the American consciousness back to the virtues of hard work rather than the imagined narrative history and character.
Young develops a theory of the literacy narrative by engaging the writers and readers in reading and writing in the genre they prefer to respond to the anxieties they face in their present cultural-historical circumstances (Young, 34). For instance, they can write about slavery in nineteenth-century America to prove their literacy and education. Though this requires joining the dominant culture, Young sees appropriate to resist the Standard English by denaturalizing it to reconfigure literary narratives (Young, 35). He endorses George Lipsitz’s counter-memory which involves using local, immediate, and personal narratives to critic and reframe the dominant narratives. This strategy gives way to Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone or the social space where cultures meet and clash while being collaborative. Here, the racial others have the chance to represent themselves by merging indigenous idioms with the metropolis which is called autoethnography.
This assertive essay boils down to Young being a minority member. For him, to become a minor means being disempowered and othered by the dominant population without a way to retort or assert one’s citizenship (Young, 38). Nevertheless, Young suggests minority discourse to counter dominant discourse. Through minor literature, as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a minority writer may deterritorialize language, connect to political action, and be part of a collective assemblage of enunciation (Young, 40). Minority discourse is not at all oppositional to the dominant discourse. Instead, it assumes the possibilities of new meanings and values, new practices and relationships that are continually emerging as noted by Raymond Williams.
To sum up, minor re/visions by Young can make a dent in the American prejudiced culture. Powerful literary narratives of the minority can change the mindset of readers, gain an audience in the mainstream, and call forth political actions that will correct the ideological constructions of literacy and race.
Work Cited
Young, Morris. Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship. Carbondale, 2004.