The early decades of the twentieth century, especially the 1920s and 1930s, were marked by intense and sustained anticolonial articulation almost all across the colonized world. J. Daniel Elam’s World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth argues, in the specific context of colonial India, that prominent anticolonial thinkers and activists were imagining and reimagining reading as “a properly anticolonial practice” during this time (ix). What made reading an anticolonial practice for the likes of Lala Har Dyal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh was its conception in terms of its “inconsequence” that is, “read[ing] simply for the sake of reading” (ix). Reading for them was the means to disavow mastery and authority, the way of readers remaining readers with others in a communal, collective, and egalitarian space that was made, unmade, and remade in the very act of reading.

The four chapters of the book, centered around these four anticolonial thinkers respectively, attest to the truth and effectiveness of the author’s argument as they reveal the sustained manner in which anticolonial theory and practice engaged with various modes of “refusal, nonproductivity, inconsequence, inexpertise, and nonauthority”—values that presented a sharp contrast to those of English liberalism (x). As a result, inspired by reading that invested in such recalcitrant ideals, anticolonial practice came to disavow faith in any kind of imagination of what the postcolonial may be. Instead, it emphasized the continuous promise of antiauthoritarianism, the “celebration of unknowingness ad infinitum” (xii).

What connects the subtitle of Elam’s book, that is, Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics, with its title, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth, is the meaningful and skillful way in which it underlines resonances among anticolonial practice, Frantz Fanon’s writings, and the works that contributed to the once-prominent discipline of comparative philology. Elam rightly suggests that Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is “a document of unknowing” as it remains quite concerned about the nature of the postcolonial world yet to come. Opposed to colonial logic, the work “documents unknowability” and imagines a transient collectivity in the “now”—a collectivity that is premised on unknowability and unknowingness, a collectivity for the time being, as it were (2). The “wretched of the earth,” therefore, argues Elam, require “a politics of the impossible.” The politics of the impossible is not accountable to “regimes of “success,” “sustainability,” or “attainability,” but is instead attuned to “the meantime,” “the time being, the passing moment, and the present” (3).

It is in this context of the imagination and perpetuation of the politics of the impossible that World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth suggests a possible coming together of anticolonial practice and comparative philology. It argues that philology— “the art of slow reading” or “the love of words”—in the 1920s and 1930s was deeply invested in reexamining its own methods, the possible expansion of its application, and the nature of its politics and ethics. Additionally, it shared concerns of “radical humanism, egalitarianism, and worldliness” with anticolonial practice, and its practitioners realized the requirement to speak “in the name of collectivities defined by their unknowability, limitlessness, discontinuity, and heterogeneity” (16). Elam rightly invokes Erich Auerbach’s magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) in this context as Auerbach’s work, according to him, conceived a “worldly philology” conducive for “worldly literature,” that is, a “literature of worldliness” that inhabits the whole earth (16).

As thorough, nuanced, and convincing that the argument presented in World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth is, it also provokes certain questions in the minds of its readers. As the book rightly does not dwell on imaginations of postcolonial India and instead focuses on anticolonial politics attuned to the needs of the “meanwhile,” one wonders if the likes of Lala Har Dyal, Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh read and wrote about the precolonial pasts of India. How was their conception of the “present” or the “now,” for example, shaped by how they read the pasts of their country and its peoples? Related to this query is concern about the means by which the author Elam chooses to highlight the fine line that these anticolonial thinkers threaded between a commitment to the transient present and a sustained disinclination toward imagining the postcolonial. At a few places in the text, language usage thus slips into diction that is (un)consciously declamatory. Elam, for instance, claims that Auerbach’s philological critique abandons a world of homogenization and embraces one of “perpetual unknowability” (129). Such assertions make the readers wonder if phrases like this one actually end up giving the world the quality of unknowability. Put differently, Elam’s diction here renders the world knowable, albeit in terms of the unknowable. Finally, readers of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth may also ask if a significant difference can be understood to exist between reading of literary and nonliterary works in the larger context of anticolonial practice and comparative philology. While discussing Auerbach’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in Mimesis, for example, Elam argues that Woolf abandons the individual and steps aside “in favour of community” (128). The problem here is not so much that Elam conflates the novel’s narrative voice with that of the person Woolf but that he does not consider if anticolonial and philological thinkers recognized differences between reading literature and nonliterary texts and if the distinction had any impact on their own thoughts and practices.

Yet, as stated earlier, these are not concerns about World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. Rather, these have been provoked by a reading of the work. And there are indeed very few books like this one—books that not only argue coherently and forcefully but also make their readers ask questions that may lead to an enriched understanding of the world that we live in and share with others.