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Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

Name: Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone
Brand: Columbia University Press
SKU: 9780231218863
Price: 38.99 USD
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Contributors:

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

Publisher:

Columbia University Press

Binding:

Paperback

Book Category:

Literary Criticism, Education

Book Subcategory:

Subjects & Themes, Asian, Teaching

Book Topic:

Culture, Race & Ethnicity, Indic, Subjects

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

6/17/2025

ISBN 13:

9780231218863

Weight:

0.99 lbs

Size:

9.00 x 6.00 x 0.75 inches

Pages:

336

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product description

Description

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.

About the Author
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays What is We? (2025) and the coedited Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.

Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

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