Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/74/4/502/1722203/502srinivasan.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 13 January 2023 By J. Daniel Elam. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 192 pp. What is reading? Why do we read? Can reading change the world? These are the kinds of deceptively simple questions with which we literature professors sometimes begin our intro- ductory courses—or at least I do. My aim is to defamiliarize a near-universal practice, read- ing, that my students often take for granted. This is also one of J. Daniel Elam’saims in World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. In the course of examining four major South Asian anti- colonial thinkers, Elam radically unsettles preconceptions about what reading is (and isn’t), what it does (and cannot do). If the conventional image of the reader is a solitary individual curled up with a hardback in an armchair, Elam shows, by contrast, that reading is a profoundly collective practice. If the conventional argument for reading is to shore up one’s knowledge and gain informa- tion, Elam proposes that reading is a mode of inhabiting and confirming one’s “inexper- tise” (x). These arguments serve his larger project of redefining anticolonialism itself as antiauthoritarianism and egalitarianism, cultivated through a practice http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

Comparative Literature , Volume 74 (4) – Dec 1, 2022

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/world-literature-for-the-wretched-of-the-earth-anticolonial-aesthetics-xmMItPZx0p

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-9989282
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/comparative-literature/article-pdf/74/4/502/1722203/502srinivasan.pdf by DEEPDYVE INC user on 13 January 2023 By J. Daniel Elam. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 192 pp. What is reading? Why do we read? Can reading change the world? These are the kinds of deceptively simple questions with which we literature professors sometimes begin our intro- ductory courses—or at least I do. My aim is to defamiliarize a near-universal practice, read- ing, that my students often take for granted. This is also one of J. Daniel Elam’saims in World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. In the course of examining four major South Asian anti- colonial thinkers, Elam radically unsettles preconceptions about what reading is (and isn’t), what it does (and cannot do). If the conventional image of the reader is a solitary individual curled up with a hardback in an armchair, Elam shows, by contrast, that reading is a profoundly collective practice. If the conventional argument for reading is to shore up one’s knowledge and gain informa- tion, Elam proposes that reading is a mode of inhabiting and confirming one’s “inexper- tise” (x). These arguments serve his larger project of redefining anticolonialism itself as antiauthoritarianism and egalitarianism, cultivated through a practice

Journal

Comparative LiteratureDuke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2022

References