Introduction: Reading After Empire

Abstract

Let us read slowly, word for word. Gayatri Spivak1 Reading seems remote from the urgency of our times. Reading is slow, staggeringly inefficient, disconcertingly beyond measure, lacking substance. Readers are distracted subjects, their bodies immobile, the book a barrier to the immediacy and interaction of the social world beyond. Reading, like readers, would not appear to do very much. Nevertheless, and apparently oblivious to Franco Moretti's provocative suggestion that we abandon it (precisely on the grounds it takes so long, achieves so little), reading acts persist as a central plank of postcolonial critique: Agamben reading Melville, Bhabha reading Rushdie, Spivak reading Devi, Said reading Conrad. The familiarity of such readings, and their reiteration in the form of re-readings by other critics, is a testament to the centrality, and industry, of reading in the field. Yet the possibilities of reading itself, for empire and its aftermath remain surprisingly under-examined. Reading and the construction of readerships were crucial to the manufacture of consent at both the colonial periphery and the imperial centre. Gauri Viswanathan2 long ago established the link between the introduction of literary study and territorial expansion in British India in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Joseph Bristow has demonstrated how rising literacy rates among British working-class boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century generated imperial anxieties around the 'uncontrollable'3 character of reading. What Bristow calls 'reading for the empire', through Boys Own and related literature, became a means of preventing the 'degradation of reading' while simultaneously interpellating working-class readers in terms of their special place at the centre of things. Bristow's empire boys remind us that reading after (in the sense of following or 'in pursuit of) empire is always more than a process of subjection, and is often accompanied by unease around misreading, reading otherwise, and the generation of alternative, aberrant, potentially contrary meanings. In 1660, British slave-owners were disconcerted by Charles II's decree that 'the Council for Foreign Plantations should instruct natives, servants and slaves of the British empire' how to read the bible: They feared the very idea of a 'literate black population' who might find dangerous revolutionary ideas in books. They did not believe those who argued that a literacy restricted to the Bible would strengthen the bonds of society; they realized that if slaves could read the bible, they could also read abolitionist tracts, and that even in Scriptures the slaves might find inflammatory notions of revolt and freedom.4 In South Carolina laws were introduced that prevented blacks being taught how to read, laws that were kept in place until the mid-nineteenth century. As Alberto Manguel goes on to note, this produced a culture of 'forbidden reading', among many slaves and former slaves, such as Frederick Douglas, who was captivated by what he called the 'mystery of reading'.5 If reading has historically been a site of anxiety that carried with it the capacity for subaltern resistance, disagreement, or contestation over meaning, then postcolonial studies' preoccupation with the text in isolation appears wanting. Today we have access to innumerable interpretations of canonical imperial fiction, but little sense of the actual audiences of that writing, even less of what actually constitutes 'reading' beyond narrow academic definitions of interpretation. The professional literary critic might read contrapuntally,6 or against the grain of postcolonial discourse with consummate ease, but asked to say something about reading itself, most would falter. As Arjun Appadurai suggests in this issue, 'in so far as postcolonial cultural studies were strongly affected by the new literary criticism, there has been a tendency to interpret everything through the text, including the reader (that is, of course, the implied reader)'. …