World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth:
Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics
Fordham University Press, 2020
North America/Europe edition
“World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth lays out a novel and provocative argument for an anticolonial mode of reading. Against the usual assumption that entering the scene of world literature entails asserting cultural authority, Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial writers withdraw authority from the singular figure of an author. This aesthetics mines contingency, precariousness and unknowability precisely because it points to a world after colonialism that is not yet in place. Worldly reading, Elam compellingly argues, is not about the formation and cultivation of subjects but the convocation of collectivities for a world to come. Essential reading for those concerned with the future of comparative literature and the world.” (Natalie Melas, Cornell University)
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates 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.
To trace this impossible political theory, Elam foregrounds 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 imperial rule, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty.
Aligning Frantz Fanon’s political writing with Erich Auerbach’s philological project, Elam brings together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought to demonstrate 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.
Reviews & Commentaries
Book Form: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth
Global South Studies, Summer 2023
Book Review: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth
by Chinmaya Lal Thakur, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, September 2022
Book Review: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth
by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Comparative Literature, Fall 2022
The United States, India, and Global (Anti)Imperialism
by Bassam Sadiki, Pyriscence, July 2021
Anticolonial Aesthetics and a Politics of the Impossible
Anticolonial Aesthetics Part II
by John McGowan, March 2021