The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony

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Professor Saikat Majumdar (Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ashoka University, India)

The Amateur

Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony

Professor Saikat Majumdar (Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ashoka University, India)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic USA
08 August 2024

Literature: history & criticism; Literary theory; Literary studies: post-colonial literature

Can ignorance, mistake, failure shape ways of reading, or do they disrupt its proper practice? What happens when the authority of modern education and culture places canonical western texts in the way of readers who live in worlds remote from their material contexts?

The Amateur reads patterns of autodidactism and intellectual self-formation under systems of colonial education that are variously repressive, exclusionary, broken, or narrowly instrumental. It outlines the development of a wide range of writers, activists, and thinkers whose failed relationships with institutions of knowledge curiously enabled their later success as popular intellectuals. Bringing current debates around reading together with the history of higher education in the postcolony, it focuses on three primary locations: Black intellectuals in apartheid-era South Africa in the aftermath of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, 20th century Caribbean writers who sought to understand the disembodied legacy of the diaspora through accidental encounters with literature and history, and writers from late-colonial and postcolonial India whose disruptive self-formation departed from the administrative project of professionalizing a particular kind of colonial subject.

Celebrating flawed and accidental forms of reading, writing, and learning along the periphery of the historical British Empire, Majumdar reveals an unexpected account of the humanities in the postcolony.

By: Professor Saikat Majumdar (Professor of English and Creative Writing Ashoka University India)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501399862
ISBN 10: 1501399861
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 08 August 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He is the author of a monograph, Prose of the World (2013) and five novels, including The Firebird/Play House (2015/2017), and The Remains of the Body (2024); and the co-editor of The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Reviews for The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony

In gorgeous prose, Saikat Majumdar conjures up scenes of autodidacts and amateur readers in the colonies, describing their idiosyncratic, haphazard, and ambivalent encounters with books. These encounters, he shows, have much to teach scholars of literature. A brilliant and groundbreaking contribution to postcolonial studies as well as to debates about the aims, methods, and value of reading. * Rita Felski, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA *