J. Daniel Elam

I write about activism: anticolonial revolutionaries in the 1910s-1920s; anti-racist thinkers in the 1930s-1940s; Third World solidarity in the 1950s-1960s; anti-apartheid movements in the 1970s; and AIDS activism in the 1980s-1990s.

I am the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (2020) and Impossible and Necessary (2020). I have co-edited two volumes on revolutionary anticolonial writing, Reading Revolutionaries (with Kama Maclean, 2014) and Writing Revolution (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, 2017). I am the editor of the Bloomsbury Press Anthology of Political and Aesthetic Theory from the Global South (2022). I am currently writing a book about anticolonial sociology, a biography of my great-uncle, and a book about MK Gandhi’s popularity in the US.

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, I was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University; in 2015-2016, I was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I received degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University.

When I was seventeen, I wrote and directed a musical based on the epic of Gilgamesh.