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

The institutionalization of a literary curriculum was part of the ideological enterprise of British rule in the colony. This book examines South-Asian, Caribbean, and African writers and public intellectuals for whom anti-colonial amateur criticism and discourse is the primary mode of thought, articulation and world-making.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 11 July 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Ignorance, mistake, and failure can shape ways of reading, disrupting its proper practice. 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, it can lead to failed relationships with institutions of knowledge. However, these failed relationships can also be a source of strength and enable later success as popular intellectuals.

The Amateur explores 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. It brings current debates around reading together with the history of higher education in the postcolony, focusing 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.

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

Weight: 302g
Dimension: 139 x 216 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781501399879