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An Anticolonial Theory of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

J. Daniel Elam
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Extract

In 1931, S.R. Ranganathan, an unknown literary scholar and statistician from India, published a curious manifesto: The Five Laws of Library Science. The manifesto, written shortly after Ranganathan's return to India from London—where he learned to despise, among other things, the Dewey decimal system and British bureaucracy—argues for reorganizing Indian libraries. Ranganathan believed that India's libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed five fundamental laws.

Type
Theories and Methodologies New Geographies of Reading
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 1: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , January 2019 , pp. 172 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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References

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