Indigenous Vanguards

Emily Apter, New York University:
Nothing short of a disciplinary milestone for new genealogies, epistemologies, and cartographies of the comparative humanities, this impeccably researched and carefully argued literary history maps the configuration of postindependence self-determination movements worldwide. In scope and intellectual sensitivity, Indigenous Vanguards is a major contribution to postcolonial theory and the class stratifications of geomodernism.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University:
In this brilliantly researched book, Ben Conisbee Baer shows us the diversity of the dream of subaltern education shared by global anticolonialism and antiracism. Its relationship to Marxism is given in historical detail. Through meticulous close readings, Indigenous Vanguards shows how the literary both represents and enacts these dreams. The readings of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn are provocatively original.