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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, "Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Description: In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), 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...