Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
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
Comparative Literature – Duke University Press
Published: Dec 1, 2022
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.