Overview
J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He previously taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in "Bibliomigrancy" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on anticolonialism and anti-imperial critique from South Asia at the beginning of the twentieth-century. He is the co-editor (with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat) of two books on South Asian revolutionary anticolonialism and has published essays in Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, BioScope, and PMLA.
Research Focus
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Democracy examines a heretofore unacknowledged aesthetic practice in South Asian political writing in the works of M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, and Bhagat Singh, among others. This form of anticolonial thought argued for reading and communal interpretation not in order to cultivate a form of mastery, but precisely to disavow mastery altogether. These thinkers urged readers to read for its own sake – that is, for inconsequence. Reading, in this formula, was a practice of egalitarian antiauthoritarianism precisely because it urged readers to refuse the calls of authorship, and, relatedly, authority. To remain a reader – and to remain a reader with others – was precisely the goal of this anticolonial theory of reading. To become or remain a reader, and thus purposefully divest oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Raj, which claimed to prize self-mastery as the alleged proof necessary for national independence.
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth argues that the literary and philosophical project of contemporary democracy emerged not from within Europe, but rather as a response to the horrors of its colonial rule around the world. In the case of British India, where the British author was the aesthetic extension of British authority, reconfiguring the hierarchical relationship between the allegedly transcendent author and the multitude of readers was a way to imagine a postcolonial democracy. To upend this colonial configuration, anticolonial writers disavowed expertise and self-mastery, and, instead, asserted a heteronomous collectivity through practices of reading. As an anticolonial practice, reading could mark modes of refusal, non-productivity, inconsequence, in-expertise, and non-authority. In direct contrast to the values of British liberalism, these recalcitrant ideals were perfect for envisioning a radical egalitarianism rooted in communal reading and collective textual criticism. In this sense, although anticolonial thinkers openly advocated Indian independence from British rule, they endeavoured to imagine, quite seriously, a nation founded less on authoritative national sovereignty and more on egalitarian readerly internationalism – or, as one activist declared, ‘a flag of books, in the hands of all’.