In this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing that her activities as a dramatist and translator constitute foundational efforts to imagine an emerging postcolonial reading public. The article considers Wynter’s heretofore-neglected adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba. The play appears in the newly founded Jamaica Journal in 1968, alongside an essay theorizing adaptation, production, and sets. Adaptation, for Wynter, is strategy of postcolonial reading that requires careful reinterpretation, an emphasis on historicity, and sensitivity to the imperatives of theatricality. The play evidences Wynter’s concern with the politics and poetics of translation, a transformative act that exemplifies the process of indigenization theorized in her later works. Wynter transforms Lorca’s original, “transposing” it to a Jamaican setting and adding dialogue and content to craft a scathing meditation on the legacies of colonialism. Published shortly after Jamaican independence in 1962, this play imagines a “truly indigenous theatre” as central to the formation a postcolonial public.