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The concept of the rhizome was first articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, published in French in 1975 and translated into English in 1986. Here the term emerges from a reading of Kafka’s description of movements in his novels and short stories, but it is also tied to a mode of reading and of composition. In Mille Plateaux (1980), translated into English as A Thousand Plateaus in 1987, the term has both a broad reference towards modes of thinking and analyzing that are nonhierarchical and decentered, and a more specifically literary sense of styles of writing. In A Thousand Plateaus, the term is introduced in order to describe a mode of composition that is distinct from the book, and a theory of language that is opposed to a basic structure, logic, or grammar from which variations develop. Languages and dialects do not emerge from a central grammar; instead, everything begins with variations of sound and sense. There is no universal grammar; every language has its distinct mode of growth. It is therefore illegitimate to talk of grammar “trees,” and far better to think of variation without a center. Rather than a linear development or progression, a rhizomatic text is composed of multiple points of entry. A rhizome is a lateral, decentered, proliferating, and interconnected web of relations and is therefore unlike the hierarchical (root, branch, offshoots) model of a tree.

As they developed their theory of minor literature in the mid-1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari created more than a concept of literary criticism. Articulating minor thought as a theoretical mode of engagement that impels the minor author to evolve into an agent of transformative experimentation and collective awareness, Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka theorizes this radically reassessed function of the writer in terms of marginal subjectivity—the subject position of an “immigrant” whose task is to craft an innovative “minor language” on the margin of the “major language” of mainstream society, along with projecting new visions of diverse collectivities within the traditional nation-state that challenge and transform its identitarian definitions of gender, class, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic “standards.” It is around this paradigmatic conception of the minor subject as perpetual immigrant and “nomadic” other that Gloria Anzaldúa and Kathy Acker develop their own variations on the Deleuze–Guattarian minor mode: narrative presentations of the deterritorialized subjects that inhabit the pluralistic Borderlands (Borderlands/La Frontera) and the transnational Empire (Empire of the Senseless). Seeking to renew standard English in order to develop within it innovative esthetic, social, and global visions, the two authors confront their readers with the experiences of minority existence, endeavoring to develop, through the prototypical narrative agents at the center of their works, emergent modalities of hybrid transnational subjectivity—a new post-statist subject, in sum. By depicting their central narrative agents as transnational nomads confronted with the limitations and potentialities of their minority status, Acker and Anzaldúa engage in highly complex social and ontological explorations of the plural inflections of the minor subject as they are expressed in the hybrid idioms he or she adopts and the sociocultural choices they make. In presenting the reader with narrative agents who dwell on the margin of the general social norm, both authors posit the minor subject as the embodiment of a “borderline” existence in which the Borderlands and the Empire are not conceived as geopolitical spaces but rather as conceptual sites of social experimentation; collective realms governed by a universal desire to supersede all borders, imaginary or geopolitical. A central conclusion emerges from Acker’s and Anzaldúa’s visions of the transnational, hybrid subject and collectivity: the deterritorialized movements of groups and individuals envisioned by both authors are at the heart of the postmodern nomad’s aspirations—an inherently transnational quest for self-fulfillment through which she or he seeks unfamiliar horizons as she or he experiments with various elements of hybridity, allowing him/herself to apprehend the existential conditions of his/her exile as affirmative instruments toward asserting the global in relation to the local and the transnational in relation to the national.