The Critic as Artist

An examination of the aesthetic identity of criticism as a literary genre in global English writing. Focusing on English writers within minoritized and postcolonial traditions, The Critic as Artist explores the hybrid form of “creative criticism” as a convergence of the intellectual and the imaginative to produce a new understanding of the relationship between reading, writing, teaching, and activism. Saikat Majumdar reads key thinkers and their imaginative criticism as autoethnographic practice: A.K. Ramanujan and Trinh T Minh-ha on myth, folklore, and literature; Alice Walker and Njabulo Ndebele on community and nationality; and Zadie Smith, Amit Chaudhuri, and Hoshang Merchant on one’s love-hate relationship with tradition. Examining themes that can be neither exclusively theorized, nor exclusively embodied, he demonstrates how, when one gets mired in the subjective nature of one’s claim, the intellectual voice remains retrievable only through the artistic. The Critic as Artist celebrates the uniquely embodied nature of criticism as a literary practice that originates from the entanglements of self and archive, subject and history, individual and community.