Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and livestream.
In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.
Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.
Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading.
Discussant: Hafsa Rahman (History)
Guest Office Hour: Dr. Mukhopadhyay will have a guest office hour on 4/8 between 1-3PM. Grad students are encouraged to sign up for a 20-minute slot if they're interested in talking to her directly & perhaps sharing their own projects with her.
Co-sponsored by UMN Institute for Global Studies.
About the Speaker
I study the literary history of the colonial world, primarily of South Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of my research explores practices of reading in this period, focusing on situations that challenge our notions of what it means to read and who is a reader. Some of these concerns are addressed in my current book project, in which I argue that colonial subjectivities were formed not by an intense engagement with writers such as Milton and Hume, but rather, through superficial and fleeting relationships with the most mundane of textual forms, such as the petition, almanac, and instruction manual, among others. I have also begun work on a second project on the multimedia history of the lecture at the turn of the twentieth century, placing it in the early context of anti-colonialism as a global movement.
My research has appeared in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Victorian Culture, and the edited volume, Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. I am also a co-editor of The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices, a collection of essays that seeks to explore some of the ways in which books travel across national and linguistic borders.
Before coming to Yale, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.