Overview

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.

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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 <i>Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience</i> 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

Author Information

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.

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