Department of Comparative Literature
Book Launch: World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth
Date: Thursday, 3 Dec 2020
Time: 5 PM (GMT +8)
Speaker: J. Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Please register at https://forms.gle/g7oSd3nb1egYKmMt9 for Zoom Meeting ID
About the author:
Dr. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He has previously taught at the University of Toronto and was the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Bibliomigrancy’ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Daniel specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He works on literature from the ‘global south’, with a focus on anticolonial movements in British Empire. He also works Black American anti-racist thought in the 1920s and 1930s, Third World solidarity movements during the Cold War, and anti-Apartheid activism in South Africa in the 1960s-1980s. He has written on Bhagat Singh, M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, and other figures. He has published essays in many journals, including Postcolonial Studies, Interventions, and PMLA. He is the co-editor, with Kama Maclean and Chris Moffat, of two volumes on South Asian revolutionary writing: Reading Revolutionaries (2014) and Writing Revolution (2017). His forthcoming monograph is Impossible and Necessary: Anticolonialism, Reading, Critique (Fordham University Press). At HKU, Daniel teaches courses in postcolonial theory, global modernism, and theories of comparativism. More information about his work can be found at www.jdelam.com
Respondent: Shruti Kapila, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge
Shruti Kapila is University Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. She is the editor of An Intellectual History for India and the coeditor of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India. Her writing has appeared in leading academic journals such as Past and Present and Modern Intellectual History and in international publications such as the Financial Times, India Today, and Prospect.
Moderator: Soo Ryon Yoon, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University
Soo Ryon Yoon is an assistant professor in cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Trained as a performance studies scholar, she teaches and writes about contemporary performance, dance history, and racial politics in South Korea. She is currently working on her first monograph, Choreographing Affinities: Blackness, Koreanness, and Performing Race in Korea on the circulation of African diasporic performances in the Korean context. Soo Ryon Yoon holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and was a CEAS postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
Please register below and the Zoom link will be sent to you a day before the event.
About the book:
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.
Please register at the link above. The Zoom link will be sent to you a day before the event.
For enquiries, please contact Christine Vicera at viceracn@hku.hk