This article critically examines and rereads J. Daniel Elam’s World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (2021) in order to show how it advances a radical rethinking of world literature and sketches an “impossible” project for the humanities to come. Rejecting institutional and market-driven definitions of world literature as a canon, discipline, or network of globally circulating texts, Elam reconceives it as an act: a reader-centered, collective, future-oriented, and potentially emancipatory practice. Beginning with Dante and Erich Auerbach, the essay develops the idea of “reading in times of crisis,” where reading becomes an existential and political response to exile, historical rupture, and the collapse of meaning. The discussion then engages a series of anticolonial figures—including Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh—to demonstrate how practices of collective, self-effacing reading can function as political training grounds, unsettling authorial supremacy and opening a shared horizon oriented toward egalitarian futures whose realization remains uncertain. For Elam, the “wretched” are those cast by empire and modernity into a world not of their choosing; reading, in this context, is neither nostalgic restoration nor academic exercise, but a disciplined renunciation of self-sufficient authority and a slow construction of a democratic “we” (or "us"). World literature, thus, becomes less a body of texts than an ongoing ethical and political practice through which readers attempt to inhabit, however provisionally, the possibility of a more just and shared world.