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.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. She is a coeditor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her writing has appeared in venues such as the New Yorker, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Caravan.