The Amateur - by Saikat Majumdar (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Saikat Majumdar examines a range of South-Asian, Caribbean, and African writers - C.L.R. James, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, along with several others - who emerge from their engagement with poor and provincial colonial and postcolonial educational systems as amateur intellectuals of wide public appeal. 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 and contextualist reading that professional literary scholarship enshrines today"--

Book Synopsis

Included in "The Best Scholarly Books of 2024" - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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.

Review Quotes

"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. It's 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

"In an age of hyper-professionalism, where the amateur and the autodidact has been deemed marginal, The Amateur shows the possibilities, pleasures and productive potential of amateur reading, even -perhaps especially - when undertaken in colonial and postcolonial settings. Readers in the colonies and in the postcolony avidly read the literature of their imperial overlords in ways which were unexpected and sometimes, as with Naipaul, Toru Dutt, CLR James and others discussed here, highly generative. Majumdar's deft history of amateur reading and criticism doubles up as a history of literary humanities across the reaches of the British empire, including India, South Africa and the Caribbean. Scholarly and erudite, but also playful and engaging, this is an important book that should be read by all those interested in English literature, colonial and postcolonial studies." --Sanjay Seth, Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

"An unusual and innovative work, The Amateur reads a long line of colonial readers who blossom into writers - in India, Africa, and the Caribbean - and miraculously turn the reading of the colonizers' literature into an improbable vehicle for their personal and at times collective means of imaginative liberation." --Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Columbia University, USA

"Debate about the role of Western education in Britain's colonies and former colonies (including the United States) is as old as the British empire itself. [...] Saikat Majumdar's The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony opens up a startlingly fresh perspective on these debates, attending to the unexpected and agonistic ways in which this education system shaped particular individuals whose work has had profound impact around the world. [...] Majumdar's often-searing and bittersweet stories of amateur readings from the colonial and postcolonial world also offer important lessons for debates about the humanities in the United States and the United Kingdom today, including the costs of deep professionalization of literary study. [...] The Amateur is a beautifully written scholarly book on the limits of scholarly reading and writing." --The Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author

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).