Reading, Taste and Postcolonial Studies
Professional and Lay Readers OfThings Fall Apart
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3234064 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James Procter (Newcastle University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 180-198 |
| Publication date | 2009-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13698010903053253 |
| OpenAlex | W1775642123 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 19 |
This essay seeks to address and account for the central but paradoxically neglected role of reading and readers in postcolonial studies. Focusing closely on recorded book group discussions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it pursues a distinction between lay readers and professional readers of postcolonial fiction in order to examine both the specificity and limits of academic reading. Drawing on the work of John Guillory, David Carter, Rita Felski and others, it proposes that much of what currently passes for postcolonial reading might be regarded as a form of what Tony Bennett terms ‘really useless knowledge’. Reading here works to secure the political potential of writing in terms of the internal aesthetics of the text itself, rather than literature's conjunctural relations with and uses by different audiences. Finally, and without seeking to privilege lay over professional readings, it asks what professionial postcolonial readers might learn from taking the former more seriously. The paper emerges out of a collaborative AHRC-funded project (2006–2010) looking at readers of postcolonial and diasporic fiction (http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com/). During 2007 it recorded book group discussions across the UK, and in specific locations in Africa, India, Canada and the Caribbean
Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Postcolonial literature · Sociology · Taste · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South African History and Culture · South Asian Cinema and Culture
When ‘Can Read’ Is Not Enough
Seeking Greener Pages
Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction
From Readers to Readers
I Am Malala
Reading in the Global Literary Marketplace
Publishing, the Curriculum and Black British Writing Today
Since when has paper any value?”
Reasons for reading in postcolonial Zambia
Bearing Witness
J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
The Postcolonial Exotic
Language and the Internet
Language and the Internet
Uses of Literature
Modernity at large
The Audience and Its Landscape
Texts in History
Literature after Feminism
The Way We Argue Now
Terror
Bearing Witness
Reading the Romance
West African Literatures
West African Literatures
The Audience and Its Landscape
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2011 - 2026 (16) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |