{"product_id":"the-amateur-self-making-and-the-humanities-in-the-postcolony","title":"The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat happens to readers formed by colonial education systems, systems that are repressive, exclusionary, broken, or narrowly instrumental, when they encounter canonical Western texts remote from their own material worlds? In \u003cem\u003eThe Amateur\u003c\/em\u003e, Saikat Majumdar offers a genuinely original answer: that ignorance, failure, and outsider status can be constitutive rather than merely obstructive. The amateur relationship to knowledge, built on autodidactic self-formation, has produced some of the most important intellectual and creative work in the postcolony.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMajumdar traces this argument through three primary locations: Black intellectuals in apartheid-era South Africa, anticolonial thinkers and writers in colonial India, and Caribbean literary culture. Across these contexts, he examines how writers, activists, and thinkers whose formal relationships with institutions of knowledge were failed or partial found precisely in that failure the conditions for a distinctive kind of intellectual freedom. Published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024, the book brings together debates in reading theory, postcolonial studies, and the history of higher education.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor faculty in literary studies, postcolonial studies, and area studies, this is a rich teaching text as well as a serious scholarly contribution. It speaks directly to ongoing debates about decolonizing the curriculum, the purpose of the humanities, and how we understand the relationship between institutional formation and intellectual practice. Majumdar is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, and his argument is as relevant to faculty thinking about pedagogy as it is to researchers in postcolonial theory.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Academic","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44053904654433,"sku":"9781501399886","price":162.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0629\/4978\/5697\/files\/cover_7534569488481.jpg?v=1776873339","url":"https:\/\/shop.fpxp.io\/products\/the-amateur-self-making-and-the-humanities-in-the-postcolony","provider":"Inkwell General Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}