Overdetermined

Dissecting the institutional politics of the minoritarian turn toward race and multiethnicity that every academic in the United States knows about but few have studied, Srinivasan offers a compelling story of what it means to teach, speak, and write in the field known as English in the past few decades. Her accented readings of the archive of Indian English literature with its cast of “overdetermined” characters are nothing short of a landmark intervention in field formation. A delightfully smart and courageous book. -- Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience
Overdetermined is an engaging, erudite, and insightful contribution to contemporary scholarship. Covering a range of authors from India and its diaspora, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan makes provocative comparisons, centers pedagogy as central to academic knowledge, and deftly crosses the fiction-theory divide. This deeply researched and accessibly written book offers exciting new directions in the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and Asian American literary studies. -- Ulka Anjaria, professor of English and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanities, Brandeis University
Overdetermined brilliantly and insightfully highlights the contours of global Anglophone fiction alongside the critical afterlife of postcolonial theory. Weaving readings of Mukherjee, Bhagat, Chaudhuri, and Lahiri together with theorists such as Spivak, Bhabha, and Said, Srinivasan reveals the complex dynamics of language and identity. Her book is a rich diagnosis of the complexities, disavowals, and tangles that inform what it means to read in the twenty-first century, as well as an inspiring model for the promises and potentials of the humanities. -- Michael Allan, associate professor of comparative literature, University of Oregon
Necessary reading because of its bold and insistent perspective that there is value in interrogating the past and engaging with its ethical and progressive idealisms to craft new futures. * South Asian Review *
In a metacritical manner, the book details Srinivasan’s experience of how the students and authors of Anglophone literature, especially in the context of South Asia, define, and are in turn defined by, the ethnic, postcolonial and Anglophone. * Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics *