The institutionalization of a literary curriculum was part of the ideological enterprise of British rule in the colony. The Amateur considers a phenomenon at striking odds with this imperial enterprise to create a certain kind of professional subject: namely, the trajectory and oeuvre of a range of postcolonial thinkers and writers whose provocative appeal derive from their positions as amateurs and autodidacts.

Saikat Majumdar examines a variety of South-Asian, Caribbean, and African writers - C.L.R. James, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, Dionne Brand, Jamaica Kincaid, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, along with several others - who emerge from their engagement with poor and provincial colonial and postcolonial educational systems as amateur intellectuals of wide public appeal. Central to this identity is the practice "poor reading", which captures the reading process of the disenfranchised reader who, located far from the original - usually metropolitan - context of the text, is singularly ill-equipped for the various modes of historical and contextualist reading that professional literary scholarship enshrines today.

The Amateur is situated in the intersection of literary studies, history of ideas, and educational history, and is an important contribution to the study of world literature, colonialism and postcolonialism, and the development of literary criticism.