Saikat Majumdar: Autodidactic nation. Education and literary subjectivity in 20th century South Africa

HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Saikat Majumdar (Ashoka University, India)

Introduction: This seminar will present a section from my book-in-progress, The Amateur (Bloomsbury, under contract), which foregrounds unexpected forms of reading, writing, and learning as they unfolded on the margins of the British Empire. There are intriguing accounts of autodidactism and critical self-making left by writers, thinkers, and activists under repressive or exclusionary systems of education enacted by different phases of colonial rule. But it is the disruptive relation to the disciplinary structures of knowledge and institution that underlay their later success as popular intellectuals. My primary archive draws on three locations: a group of Black thinkers in mid-century South Africa, particularly around the exclusionary Bantu Education Act of 1953, several 20th-century Caribbean writers who seek to understand the disembodied legacy of the diaspora through accidental encounters with literature and history, and a group of writers from late-colonial and early-postcolonial India whose intellectual amateurism charted departures from the English project of professionalising a particular kind of colonial subject. 

The South African writers, activists, and thinkers whose memoirs, criticism, and fiction I read in this chapter are Sindiwe Magona, Es’kia Mphahlele, Zoë Wicomb, Peter Abrahams, Lewis Nkosi, and Njabulo Ndebele.

About the speaker: Saikat Majumdar is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. He has taught previously at Stanford University, United States and was a Fellow at the Suzy Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College, United States. He is the author of The Middle Finger (Simon & Schuster, 2022), Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (Columbia University Press, 2014 – Honorable Mention, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize), and College (Bloomsbury India, 2017), a general nonfiction on liberal arts education in India. He is the co-editor with Aarthi Vadde of a collection of essays, The Critic as Amateur (2019). Saikat has published three novels: The Scent of God, a finalist for the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year Award 2020, and one of Times of India’s “20 Most Talked About Indian Books of 2019”; The Firebird (published as Play House in the United States), one of Telegraph’s Best Books of 2015 and a finalist at the Bangalore Literature Festival Fiction Prize and the Mumbai Film Festival Word-to-Screen Market; and Silverfish in 2007.