As we all know, writing – and by extension, becoming an author – begins with reading. And still, on occasion, scholars sheepishly confess to never having read certain foundational or canonical texts – a show of modesty intended to underscore their competence in other areas. Take, for example, a sociologist who has never read Weber’s Protestant Ethic or a philosopher who has never sat down with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Assuming the person has already achieved a certain status in their discipline, such gaps in education can be spun as a creative virtue. Yet plenty of scholars have never read a single text from whole regions of the non-Western world and rarely feel such shame about it, as no one expects them to be familiar with such works as a standard of competence in their field. This shamelessness signals what postcolonial theorists have described as “sanctioned ignorance” among elite theorists (Spivak, 1999: x), or an asymmetrical ignorance between the European centre of knowledge production and its “Third World” periphery – an asymmetry that, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, constitutes “the very nature of social science pronouncements”.
