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Project:

The Amateur

Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact? Is such an intellectual a professional or an amateur? My proposed book considers these questions in the light of the institutionalization of a humanist curriculum across the British empire in order to examine the trajectory and oeuvre of a range of postcolonial thinkers whose provocative appeal derive from their positions as amateurs and autodidacts. Such intellectual identities are at odds with colonial education’s ideological enterprise to create a certain kind of professional subject. Central to this identity is the practice “poor reading”, which captures the reading process of the disenfranchised reader who, located far from the original – usually metropolitan – context of the text, is singularly ill-equipped for the various modes of historical/contextualist reading that professional literary scholarship enshrines today.

 

 

Fellows involved in this project

Fellow
India
 
 

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Related publications

Book/Book Chapter

Majumdar, Saikat. 2024. The Amateur (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/amateur-9781501399879/

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Is any information on this page incorrect or outdated? Please notify Ms. Nel-Mari Loock at [email protected].