Reading Deliriously

This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how texts now participate in multiple cultures that trouble the boundaries between domestic and foreign, “us” and “them.” Reading deliriously outlines an approach to reading that values transnational circuits of comparison and aggregation for the way they might reconstruct the imagined reader as a navigator of world literary space rather than a protocitizen of world community. Instead of focusing on molding better citizens through reading, this piece calls for an ethics of global reading that reconsiders and expands the number of cultural systems and traditions from which the possibilities for belonging might emerge.