The Amateur

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"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"--