Srinivas Aravamudan
Reading the Global is a penetrating study that singles out a particular region—the Malay Archipelago—that has been underrepresented in recent literary and cultural interpretations of colonialism, empire, and globalization. Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates that Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah Munshi, and Joseph Conrad plot 'troubling perspectives' while using Southeast Asian locations as a kind of conceptual raw material. This book is a must-read for the cultural historian or literary scholar who wants to discover how globalization as a nonindigenous perspective nonetheless intersects with the fascinating colonial histories of seemingly neutral terms such as 'subsistence,' 'opium,' and 'running amok.' By his bravura close readings, Krishnan makes the specificity of literature and the generality of globalization matter to each other without reducing one to the other.
— Srinivas Aravamudan, professor of English, director of John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, author of Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency: 1688-1804 and Guru English: South Asian Religion In A Cosmopolitan Language
R. Radhakrishnan
Refreshingly perspectival, Sanjay Krishnan's Reading the Global does not flinch from submitting globalization to rigorous ethico-political evaluation. Rather than acquiesce to globalization as a fait accompli, this work offers a significant, symptomatic reading of what after all is a highly contradictory, uneven, and fissured phenomenon.
— R. Radhakrishnan, professor of English and comparative literature, University of California, Irvine
