Without readers and audiences, viewers and consumers, the postcolonial would be literally unthinkable. And yet, postcolonial critics have historically neglected the modes of reception and consumption that make up the politics, and pleasures of meaning-making during and after empire. Thus, while recent criticism and theory has made large claims for reading, as an ethical act, as a means of establishing collective, quasi-political consciousness, as identification with difference, as a mode of resistance, and as an impulsion to the public imagination, the reader in postcolonial literary studies...