What is reading? Why do we read? Can reading change the world? These are the kinds of deceptively simple questions with which we literature professors sometimes begin our introductory courses—or at least I do. My aim is to defamiliarize a near-universal practice, reading, that my students often take for granted. This is also one of J. Daniel Elam’s aims in World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. In the course of examining four major South Asian anticolonial thinkers, Elam radically unsettles preconceptions about what reading is (and isn’t), what it does (and cannot do).
If the conventional image of the reader is a solitary individual curled up with a hardback in an armchair, Elam shows, by contrast, that reading is a profoundly collective practice. If the conventional argument for reading is to shore up one’s knowledge and gain information, Elam proposes that reading is a mode of inhabiting...
