J. Daniel Elam, "World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics" (Fordham UP, 2020)

New Books in South Asian Studies · May 31, 2023 · 55m

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) 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…