Overview

The concept ""we"" is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of “who we are”, leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized. In What is We? Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that “we” is not a collective to belong to or be excluded from, nor is it a specific group to be identified. Rather, “we” functions as a method – one that organizes inclusion and exclusion, communion and isolation, coercion and liberation, division and incorporation, forgetting and remembering. Across ten linked chapters, the book unfolds social, historical, political, grammatical, linguistic, literary, and personal responses to its titular question. By seeing “we” as a method for enacting, apprehending, contesting, and instrumentalizing boundaries, it invites us to confront the challenge of failure, embrace the possibility of impossibility, and acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.

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9781788218375

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Reviews

An extraordinarily well-written book. It presents a powerful genealogy of so many ways in which different understandings of ‘we’ are at work in our private, social, and political lives, and of how specific meanings of ‘we’ are employed as methods of division, inclusion, etc. Its conceptualization of the fascinating and tension-laden relationship between I and we is especially insightful. -- Michael Schwarz, Emory University

In a time of deep divisiveness, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan offers an elegant and compelling meditation on an idea more essential than ever, the very notion of a collective we. Rather than taking its value as a given, Srinivasan pursues its promise as a matter of critical method, exploring what communion may yet become in radical and transformative terms. -- Anand Pandian, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University An extraordinarily well-written book, What is We? offers a powerful genealogy of the many ways different understandings of 'we' shape our private, social, and political lives. It illuminates how specific meanings of 'we' function as tools of division and inclusion alike. Especially insightful is its conceptualization of the fascinating and often tension-laden relationship between 'I' and 'we'. -- Michael Schwarz, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Emory University

Author Information

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of a literary studies monograph, Overdetermined (2025), co-writer of an epistolary memoir, The End Doesn't Happen All at Once (2025), and a co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023). Her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.

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