This issue takes up the challenge of making renewed historical sense of reading in our postcolonial present. While reading seems remote from the urgency of our times-being slow, staggeringly inefficient, disconcertingly beyond measure, lacking substance-reading acts also persist as a central plank of postcolonial critique. However, the possibilities of reading itself, for empire and its aftermath remain surprisingly under-examined, a situation which our contributors seek to redress. Following readers and reading acts from a variety of perspectives, contributors converge on the apparently insular act of reading, relocating it at intersections with anthropology, cultural history, cultural studies, literary studies and sociology.
