TY - BOOK AU - Elam,J.Daniel TI - World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics SN - 9780823289820 PY - 2020///] CY - New York, NY PB - Fordham University Press KW - Anti-imperialist movements KW - Comparative literature KW - Political aspects KW - Postcolonialism KW - Asian Studies KW - Literary Studies KW - Postcolonial Studies KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory KW - bisacsh KW - B.R. Ambedkar KW - Bhagat Singh KW - Erich Auerbach KW - Frantz Fanon KW - Lala Har Dayal KW - M.K. Gandhi KW - South Asia KW - anticolonialism KW - comparative literature KW - critique KW - philology KW - postcolonial theory N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; Introduction: Impossible Subjects --; 1 Lala Har Dayal’s Imagination --; 2 B. R. Ambedkar’s Sciences --; 3 M. K. Gandhi’s Lost Debates --; 4 Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook --; Epilogue: Stopping and Leaving --; Acknowledgments --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823289820?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780823289820 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780823289820/original ER -