Overdetermined

How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

336 Seiten

2025
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21885-6 (ISBN)

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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. 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.

Preface
Introduction. Identity and Other Open Secrets
Chapter 1. What Was Multiethnic Literature? Or, Bharati Mukherjee Doesn’t Have an Indian Accent
Chapter 2/Recess 1. You Wouldn’t Say That to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Chapter 3. When the Anglophone Reads “Like Hindi”: Or, On Not Teaching Chetan Bhagat
Chapter 4/Recess 2. The Ambivalence of Homi Bhabha’s Discourse
Chapter 5. Fictions of Divergence: Or, Amit Chaudhuri Doesn’t Write the Postcolonial
Chapter 6/Recess 3. The Idea of Edward Said
Chapter 7. A Desire Called the Post-Anglophone: Or, On Not Being Jhumpa Lahiri
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	29.04.2025
Zusatzinfo	no illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-231-21885-0 / 0231218850
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21885-6 / 9780231218856
Zustand	Neuware