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

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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.

Reviews

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 *
This fascinating, beautifully written book opens up a whole new world. Its about colonial amateur readers, readers from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, who loved literature from the far-reaches of empire and who often struggled to come to terms with what their love of canonical white literature meant to them and others. Funnily enough that is now a struggle even those of us who love literature closer to the centre share: why do we love these classics so much, remote as they are from most of those around us and indeed from the world we actually live in A book, then, that anyone interested in great literature can learn from. * Simon During, Honorary Professor of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Australia *

Author Bio

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).