Overview

"""Provocative and knotty . . . Identitti is a bracing story, one in which Sanyal refuses to give us the easy way out."" -Olivia Craighead, The New York Times ""Provocative and knotty . . . Identitti is a bracing story, one in which Sanyal refuses to give us the easy way out."" -Olivia Craighead, The New York Times Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student is in awe of her supervisor-superstar postcolonial and race studies South-Asian professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita's praise of her professor during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks-and before she learns the truth-calls into question her own reputation as a young activist. Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world. As debates on the scandal rage on social media, blogs, and among her closest friends, Nivedita's assumptions are called into question as she reconsiders the lessons she learned from her adored professor. In her thought-provoking, genre-bending debut, Mithu Sanyal solicited the contributions and commentary of public intellectuals as if Saraswati were a real person. A darkly comedic tour de force, Identitti showcases the outsized power of social media in the current debates about identity politics and the power of claiming your own voice."

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9781662601293

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Reviews

A mercilessly funny search for identity that spares nothing and nobody. Anyone who has ever asked themselves who they actually are (and why), will not only be smarter after reading it -- they're also guaranteed to be in a better mood. -Alina Bronsky, author of The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine A combination of campus novel, intellectual chamber play, blogosphere romp and satire in identity politics. You'll laugh out loud at least three times on each page. Mithu Sanyal has an incredible talent for showing both the effects of freedom of thought pushed to the extreme and the limits of discourse. -Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Sanyal actually manages to pack the whole identity-politics debate into one story -- and in such a way that you have to laugh on almost every page. -ZDF Sanyal portrays her characters in the labyrinth of identity politics with elegance, delicious humor and deep knowledge of the issues. A book for our times. -Der Tagesspiegel

Author Information

Mithu Sanyal is a cultural scientist, journalist, critic, and author of two academic books- Vulva, which was translated into five languages, and Rape, which was translated into three languages. This is her first novel.

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