Books
Overdetermined:
How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone
Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.
Overdetermined considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West.
June 2025
Preorder now from Columbia University Press
Also available for preorder on Amazon
The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir
‘Will you write letters with me, back and forth, for the duration of this virus?’
When Covid-19 isolated us all in March 2020, C and R — old friends, parents of young children, academics, and writers — turned to each other.
In 100 intensely vulnerable letters, C and R found their way through family estrangement, tense racial dynamics, gender transitions, chronic pain, dramatic career changes, and activist campaigns. Though both continued to mask and take precautions long after the world returned to ‘normal’, they were often pained by each other’s choices. Nonetheless, they always returned to the page, enacting what R calls durational performance art. The resulting book is a deeply personal, fiercely political roller coaster that plunges from the lockdowns, into social ambivalence, and finally through the long, politically manufactured ‘end’ of the pandemic.
The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once is an unusual kind of Covid book: it recasts the pandemic, in the words of Arundhati Roy, as a possible ‘portal’ into a different world. Conscious of their privileged status as vaccinated Americans, the writers examine global political realities: from Narendra Modi’s announcement of the March 2020 lockdown in India and the ensuing chaos; to the Trumpists’ attack on the US Capitol Building in 2021; from the systemic collapse in India, to the US government’s failures around racism, healthcare, gun violence, abortion laws, and the climate crisis.
These letters serve as both historical document and activist call, and above all, an inspiring testament to the power of friendship to give us the courage to change.
February 2025
Available from Aleph Book Company
Amazon.in (India/Subcontinent)
Amazon.com (US/imported copies)
Thinking with an Accent:
Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice
Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.
February 2023
What is We?
The concept "we" is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of "who we are", leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized.
In What is We? Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that "we" is not a collective to belong to or be excluded from, nor is it a specific group to be identified. Rather, "we" functions as a method – one that organizes inclusion and exclusion, communion and isolation, coercion and liberation, division and incorporation, forgetting and remembering.
Across ten linked chapters, the book unfolds social, historical, political, grammatical, linguistic, literary, and personal responses to its titular question. By seeing "we" as a method for enacting, apprehending, contesting, and instrumentalizing boundaries, it invites us to confront the challenge of failure, embrace the possibility of impossibility, and acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.
November 2025
