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Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a minor literature—linguistically deterritorialised, thoroughly political, and collectively charged—can allow us to draw parallels between distant, diverse literatures; demographic and historical similarities, such as numerical ultra-smallness, do so as well. This essay compares literatures which are both minor and ultrasmall: ultraminor, as Bergur Moberg has recently coined. It looks at the ways in which attitudes towards diversity have shaped the representation of foreigners and “the foreign” in genre fiction. It argues that the emergence and popularity of the respective genres—romance in Mauritius and thriller in Norway—is tied to societal responses to demographic concerns. Focusing on two representative novels, Natacha Appanah’s Blue Bay Palace and Gunnar Staalesen’s We Shall Inherit the Wind, it further argues that Mauritians view the instability of diversity as an inescapable starting point, while Bergenseres view this instability as a frightening, however welcomed, resolution.

This issue presents some of the most innovative and inspiring contributions to ‘Comparing Centres, Comparing Peripheries’, a 2012 British Comparative Literature Association postgraduate conference. 1 Since the title of the preceding postgraduate BCLA event, ‘Comparison Beyond the West’, may have appeared geographically prescriptive and polarizing, we sought keywords that would be inclusive, dynamic and with a critical edge. The terms ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, and the invitation to compare, did the trick: the event attracted forty speakers from various disciplinary backgrounds, who discussed a plethora of languages,regionsandphenomena.Somespeakersconjuredcomparisons claiming ‘the centre’ as the all-important yardstick; others privileged peripheral traffic, circumventing the centre; others scrutinized the scope and usage of the very terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Magnetic and multifaceted, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ served us well as title keywords and it is around them that this issue is loosely based. Literary scholars have long used the words in their general meaning and we are acutely aware that the general usage escapes a succinct summary. In this brief introduction we survey only some examples of the relatively systematic and specialized usage of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in recent world literature and comparative literature debates that draw on world systems theory from political and economic sociology. Developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, the theory envisages the whole world, since at least the sixteenth century, as one capitalist economy ‘built on a worldwidedivisionoflabor,inwhichvariouszonesofthiseconomy([...] termed the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery) [...] profited unequally from the working of the system’. 2 Before sketching how the theory, and the terms, have been harnessed in literary discussions, we note that the semi-specialized sense in

A close reading of Indo-Mauritian writer Abhimanyu Unnuth’s The Teeth of the Cactus (original: , 1982)1 reveals that literary connections need not occur only through the centre; that, indeed, periphery-periphery connections, such as those found between this Mauritian collection of poetry and the poetry of Octavio Paz – the cosmopolitan magical realist poet and a surprising favourite of Unnuth’s – destabilize the very idea of a concentric global literary paradigm. Moreover, this reading stands in response to the idea that peripheral literatures are extraneous to a truly global reading of literature. In his Conjectures on World Literature, Franco Moretti writes

Abhimanyu Unnuth is a contemporary poet, playwright, novelist, and public intellectual in Mauritius. His poetry, written in Hindi, attempts to recover the religious identity of the Bihari indentured servant community of the nineteenth century in the service of a re-membrance, in the Thiong’oian sense, of a post-independence Mauritian Hindu identity. In his best work, Kaikṭus ke Dānt, he inhabits the character of an ancestor working the sugar cane fields and understanding that work through his tenuous connection to his left-behind Hindu society through the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas. This protagonist is contrasted with the shadow subject: himself, as a post-colonial, post-independence, postlabour Hindu on the island. The myths of his ancestors connect him to narratives, but not to the sense of the place that contextualizes the epic’s stories. Only by understanding, and being able to embody, the pain that his ancestors endured on the field by invoking mythic figures, can he come to be a Mauritian Hindu. This paper assesses his linguistic choices and the effect they have on the tone of his work.