Amit Chaudhuri

Full mission statements appear on the Literary Activism website.

On Decolonisation (excerpt)

The need for the kind of rethinking suggested by the word ‘decolonisation’ is urgent because of the opportunistic, constricted versions of history, culture, and science that have been passed on to us as our only available inheritance among possible modes of self-understanding. Yet we must locate this sense of increased constriction, and the moment leading up to the call to decolonize, not only in the continuing relevance of colonial histories, but in the three-decades-old bubble of globalization with its new enclaves of privilege.

…

I’m interested in decolonization as an opportunity to enquire into the formation of cultural histories and modernity, to put to one side fundamentally unworkable categories (like ‘East’ and ‘West’), and to learn to work outside the parameters that not only colonization but the European Enlightenment has given us. Decolonisation may need to express itself as policy; but it must also work imaginatively and, in a crucial way, challenge policy. I speak about this as a writer, of course, as well as a critic, anthologist, translator, and musician: as someone who, like many other ‘postcolonial’ writers, or like the so-called ‘colonised’ writers and artists before me, don’t recognize ‘being colonised’ as a defining cultural category. Personally, I belong to a tradition that has had multiple inheritances and has had no wish to deny them. Such traditions have long worked towards new ways of thinking, and bringing culturally inflected perspectives of modernity to existing, narrowly ‘universal’, categories.

2021

On Deprofessionalisation

‘De-professionalisation’ [is] the urge, as a creative practitioner, or, indeed, a practitioner of any kind, not to be identified with one genre or activity, and to be, in general, a critic of specialisation and a champion of dabbling. The word ‘dabbling’ is being used here partly ironically, of course, but also full on, to convey the force of what a serious writer or thinker might achieve when they consciously diverge from the genre or practice they’re most identified with and even respected for. The idea and act of ‘de-professionalisation’ is really a critique of the construction of the writer, artist, or intellectual today – by publishers, by media, by festivals, by writers themselves. It also accommodates the notion of value: for instance, the idea that someone may not be ‘good’ at or trained in the skills of a particular project or genre or form they’ve embarked upon.

2016

On Literary activism (excerpt)

Is literary activism similar to what was earlier known as ‘championing’? If so, in what manner do the writers being championed participate in the fashioning of a context for championing? … What is literary activism’s relation to the emergence of ‘new literatures’, and in what way is that relation reminiscent of, or divergent from, the relations created in the past in this regard by market activism? … [T]here may well be in literary activism a strangeness that echoes the strangeness of the literary. Unlike market activism, whose effect on us depends on a certain randomness which reflects the randomness of the free market, literary activism may be desultory [or incidental], in that its aims and value aren’t immediately explicable.

2014

Cite this: Chaudhuri, Amit. “Literary Activism mission statements.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/literary-activism-mission-statements. Accessed 12 April 2026.

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Sarah Howe

Something sets us looking for a place.
For many minutes every day we lose
ourselves to somewhere else. Even without
knowing, we are between the enveloping sheets
of a childhood bed, or crossing
that bright, willow-bounded weir at dusk.
Tell me, why have I come? I caught
the first coach of the morning outside
the grand hotel in town. Wheeled my case
through the silent, still-dark streets of the English
quarter, the funereal stonework facades
with the air of Whitehall, or the Cenotaph,
but planted on earth’s other side. Here
no sign of life, save for street hawkers, solicitous,
arranging their slatted crates, stacks of bamboo
steamers, battered woks, to some familiar
inward plan. I watch the sun come up
through tinted plexiglas. I try to sleep
but my eyes snag on every flitting, tubular tree,
their sword-like leaves. Blue metal placards
at the roadside, their intricate brooch-like
signs in white, which no one disobeys.
I am looking for a familiar face. There is
some symbol I am striving for. Yesterday
I sat in a cafe while it poured, drops
like warm clots colliding with the perspex
gunnel roof. To the humid strains of Frank
Sinatra, unexpectedly strange, I fingered
the single, glossy orchid – couldn’t decide
if it was real. I picked at anaemic
bamboo shoots, lotus root like
the plastic nozzle of a watering can,
over-sauced – not like you would make at home.
I counted out the change in Cantonese.
Yut, ye, sam, sei. Like a baby. The numbers
are the scraps that stay with me. I hear
again your voice, firm at first, then almost
querulous, asking me not to go.
I try to imagine you as a girl –
a street of four-storey plaster buildings,
carved wooden doors, weathered, almost shrines
(like in those postcards of old Hong Kong you loved) –
you, a child in bed, the neighbours always in
and out, a terrier dog, half-finished bowls
of rice, the ivory Mah Jong tablets
clacking, like joints, swift and mechanical,
shrill cries – ay-yah! fah! – late into the night.
My heart is bounded by a scallop shell –
this strange pilgrimage to home.

*

The bus sinks
with a hydraulic sigh. So, we have crossed
the imaginary line. The checkpoint
is a concrete pool. The lichen-green uniformed
official, with his hat brimmed in black gloss,
his elegant white-gloved hands, his holstered
gun, slowly mounts the rubber steps,
sways with careful elbows down the aisle. I lift
this crease-marred passport, the rubbed
gold of the lion crest – a mute offering.
Two fingers brace the pliant spine, the thumb
at the edge – an angle exact as a violinist’s
wrist – fanning through stamps to halt at the last
laminated side. He lifts his eyes to read
my face. They flicker his uncertainty
as he makes out eyes, the contour of a nose:
half-recognition. These bare moments –
something like finding family.
The mild waitress in Beijing. Your mother…
China… worker? she asked, at last, after
many whispers spilling from the kitchen.
Or the old woman on the Datong bus,
doubtless just inviting a foreigner to dinner,
but who could have been my unknown
grandmother, for all I knew or understood.
She took a look at me and reached up
to grasp my shoulders, loosing a string
of frantic, happy syllables, in what
dialect I don’t even know. She held my
awkward hands, cupped in her earthenware
palms, until the general restlessness showed
we neared the stop. As the doors lurched open,
she smiled, pressed a folded piece of paper,
blue biro, spidery signs, between my fingers,
then joined in the procession shuffling off. Some,
I realised then, were in hard hats, as they
dwindled across the empty plain, shadowed
by the blackened, soaring towers of the mine.

*

Something sets us looking for a place.
Old stories tell that if we could only
get there, all distances would be erased.
Wheels brace themselves against the ground
and we are on our way. Soon we will reach
the fragrant city. The island rising
into mist, where silver towers forest
the invisible mountain, across that small
span of cerulean sea. I have made
the crossing. The journey you, a screaming
baby, made, a piercing note among grey,
huddled shapes, some time in nineteen-forty-
nine (or year one of the fledgling People’s
State). And what has changed? The near-empty
bus says enough. And so, as we approach,
stop-start, by land, that once familiar scene –
the warm, phthalo-green, South China tide –
I can make out rising mercury
pin-tips, distinct against the blue
as the outspread primaries at the edge
of a bird’s extending wing. So much
taller now than when I left
fifteen years ago. Suddenly, I know –
from the Mid-Levels flat where I grew up,
set in the bamboo grove – from the kumquat-
lined windows on the twenty-fifth floor,
tinted to bear the condescension’s glare –
you can no longer see the insect cars
circling down those jungle-bordered boulevards.
The low-slung ferry, white above green,
piloting the harbour’s carpet of stars,
turned always home, you can no longer see.

~

Published in Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015).

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This poem comes from D-Empress Dianne Regisford’s ‘Hersto-rhetoric? Na so today!!!’. Highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

It requires a certain gait
To carry dignity intended
To carry femininity
Rolling waves into honey raveens
Across curves
Waisted & hipped

All roads lead they say?
It is in the curl of your lips
Initiate the swing of your hips
And show dem girl
Roll those hips
In that certain gait

Bead songs crafted through colour, style and chink
Generations invested from she to she
Sweet fecundity is your prerogative
To be, all woman
Show them girl, show dem!

For, as you walk and wine
Feel the power of your being
From a single chink to cascade harmonies
Beaded waists and churning hips
For, it takes a certain feline gait…

Celebrate your rolling hills
Carry your serenade,
There’s no space for bashful promenade
This place is yours, claim it
Work it girl, you hold da power It only takes one chink….

Arrested, you have them
Alert, ready
You? P.H.A.T!
You hold the reins
It’s sweet like dat!

Fade to black….

Cite this: D-Empress Dianne Regisford. “Waist Bead Serenade.” Hersto-rhetoric? Na so today!!!, Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 April 2026.

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This extract comes from p. 182 of Zadie Smith’s NW. We’re interested in your reading experience. The text is fully annotatable: highlight any portion of the text to add your own thoughts.

17. GCSE

In the office of Keisha Blake’s Head of Year baseball caps and inappropriate jewellery were confiscated and hung from the wall on hooks. Keisha Blake had not been called in for a reprimand, she had come to discuss her options for a set of exams still three years in the future. She did not really want to discuss these exams, she simply wanted it to be noted that she was the kind of person who thought three years ahead about the important things in life. As she got up to leave she spotted a silver chain from which drooped a tiny pistol picked out in diamanté crystals. ‘That’s my sister’s,’ she said. ‘Oh, is it?’ said the teacher, and looked out of the window. Keisha persisted: ‘She doesn’t go here any more. She got expelled.’ The teacher frowned. He took the necklace from the wall and passed it to Keisha. He said: ‘It’s hard to believe that you and Cheryl Blake are even related.’

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This extract comes from pp. 287–288 of Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone. We’re interested in your reading experience. Did any part of this passage draw you in or jump out at you in a particular way? Highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

The dead man was young, childhood’s mark still on his features. Qayyum lowered his head in shame as he stood in front of the body explaining to the boy’s father and brothers the terms of the funeral. If only Ghaffar Khan were in Peshawar, surely this wouldn’t happen. But the men accepted what he said without question. They’d worried they wouldn’t be allowed to the graveyard at all; any burial was better than none.

Only one of the men appeared not to listen to anything Qayyum said. He sat on the ground, holding the hand of the dead man whose face was his face. Twins, one of the men of the family whispered to Qayyum. He carried the corpse home all the way from the Street of Storytellers; he said it was like carrying his own death. Qayyum knelt in front of the unpaired twin.

– I’m sorry. To lose a brother must be the greatest of all griefs.

The man looked up at Qayyum.

– Do you have brothers?

– Yes, one.

– Was he on the Street of Storytellers yesterday?

– No. He’s in the Cantonment. He must be worrying about me but I don’t know when he and I can reach each other again.

– Come with us then.

– What?

– Come with us when we leave the Walled City for the graveyard.

Want to say more? Visit the forum to continue the conversation.

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This poem is from Daljit Nagra’s Look We Have Coming to Dover! (p. 30). It’s fully annotatable, so you can highlight any portion of the text to annotate it with your own thoughts.

Dad and me were watching the video –
Amar, Akbar, Anthony. It’s about three
brothers separated after the family is parted
by gangsters. You can get it with subtitles, Miss.
When Anthony, who grows up in a Catholic home,
begged Christ for the address of his real parents
then crossed himself, I jumped off our royal red
sofa, joined Anthony with his prayer:
Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary,
four-quartering myself then curtseying a little.

Dad just stared at me, knocking his turban side
to side that I almost thought it would come off
which it normally does when he’s doing his press-ups
and his face goes mauve. Instead he took off
his flip-flop (the one with a broken thong),
held it in the air, shouting in ‘our’ language:
Vut idiot! If you vunt to call on Gud,
call anytime on anyvun of our ten gurus.
Do yoo tink is white Gud’s wife yor mudder?

Dad’s got a seriously funny way Miss,
sometimes he cries, and says he’s going to give me
to a Sikh school, a proper school. That’s why
I did what my cousin Ashok does at our local
temple – while you were all doing Hail Mary
to end registration, I first locked my hands,
knelt down, prayed with this ditty we do on Sundays,
imagined the Golden Temple and our bearded gods
to your up-on-the-cross one, then roared:
Wahay Guru!
Wahay Guru!
Wahay Guru!
Like that.

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This extract comes from pp. 1–2 of Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy. Feel free to highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

I am my father’s griot, this is a hymn to him. I am telling you this story so that I can turn my father’s blood and bones, and whatever magic his mother sewed under his skin, into history. To make him a hero, not the fighting or romantic kind but the real deal, the starved child that survives every sling and arrow that shameless fortune throws at them, and who can now sit back and tell the stories of all the ones that didn’t make it. I tell you this story because no-one else will. Let us call down the spirits of the nine thousand boys who foolishly battled on the mountains of Eritrea for Mussolini, who looked like my father, lived like him but had their lives cut off with blunt axes, the ones starved to death, the ones who lost their minds, and the ones who simply vanished. Boys like Shidane Boqor Our fiery boy! Our pilferer of canned goods! Our dead child! Light the torches for his flight to heaven. Let his shadow always haunt his tormentors. Let them bathe for all eternity in the Shebelle and Juba before their sins are washed away.

My father’s life has been an exercise in a strange kind of liberty; if he outwitted death then his life was to be completely, perfectly his own, owing no debts to anyone or anything. Like his mother before him, he sharpened his spirit on the knife edge of solitude; stylites on their pillars, they saw loneliness, aloneness, oneness as divine states. The mother of all sailors is meant to be the sea, but Ambaro was more powerful, more tempestuous, more life-giving than any puddle of water. She gave life to my father over and over again, guarding him as did Aeneas. She took his paltry little life and moulded it into something epic. Her love was violent, thick lava that she poured into her son’s mouth, she cut her veins and transfused her hot wild blood into his soul. She was all that he needed in life and he remains here testament to what a mother’s love can do, it turns wax into gold.

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This extract comes from pp. 151–152 of Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Feel free to highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

Rubbish, I thought, though in fact he was not too far from the truth. The astronauts stepping into the craft, turning and waving, their weightless antics in space did indeed seem to correspond to the rhythm of the music. The same became true even of the programme hosts as they gestured and swivelled. The more I watched, the more it seemed so. After a few minutes I laughed out loud and turned to the fellow, but he had moved away. I watched for a few more minutes and laughed again. At some point I began to feel a little dizzy. I shook my head and looked at the picture again. Air. I needed air. I went out to the verandah, passing Ade, who asked me if I was all right. I brushed his hand away. I saw the back of Saffia. Did I mention to you her very resolute posture? Yes, quite unyielding, in fact. I turned and headed in the other direction, knocking against a chair, which caused a small amount of my drink to spill on to the back of the woman sitting in it. She shrieked and snapped her head around to glare at me. I mumbled an apology, but didn’t stop.

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This extract comes from p. 3 of Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin edition, 2002). The text is fully annotatable: highlight any portion to add your own thoughts.

Who do you love? Who do you love,
when the man you married goes off

for months on end, quelling rebellions
at the frontiers, or playing hot-shot senator in Rome;

his flashy villa on the Palatine Hill, home
to another woman, I hear,

one who has borne him offspring.
My days are spent roaming this house,

its vast mosaic walls full of the scenes on Olympus,
for my husband loves melodrama.

They say his mistress is an actress,
a flaxen-Fräulein type, from Germania Superior.

Oh, everyone envied me, Illa Bella Negreeta!
born in the back of a shop on Gracechurch Street,

who got hitched to a Roman nobleman,
whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on a barge,

no burnished throne, no poop of beaten gold,
but packed with vomiting brats

and cows releasing warm turds
on to their bare feet. Thus perfumed,

they made it to Londinium on a donkey,
with only a thin purse and a fat dream.

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