Overdetermined

"In Overdetermined, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan offers a critical and institutionally situated analysis of contemporary Indian English literatures. She considers how writers, critics, and readers negotiate and resist the categories that define the field -- Indian English, Ethnic, Postcolonial, Anglophone. In doing so Srinivasan lays bare a phenomenon in English literary studies that is both widely observed and taken for granted, as well as undertheorized and understudied: the pervasive correspondence of writer and identity, scholar-subject and studied-object in minority literary fields in the United States. Each of the four chapters focuses on the work of a single author, how they have understood their identity and how they've been read: Bharati Mukherjee's disavowal of being an Indian-American writer as she became regarded as an Asian American ethnic literary pioneer and mainstay in the curriculum; how Chetan Bhagat's challenge to literary Anglophonism motivates his calculated presentation of "bad English" as a conduit to the Indian vernacular sphere and the lives of "real" Indians; the ways in which Amit Chaudhuri's rejection of hegemonic postcolonialism's investments in history and the nation underlies his writing of the domestic and the autofictional; And, Jhumpa Lahiri's move into Italian to underscore the continuities between the ethnic American and post-Anglophone literary projects to question conventional identity politics. Throughout the book, Srinivasan draws on her own experiences in the classroom to examine how contemporary Indian English literature becomes American, through a process that is historically and institutionally specific and that has implications for reading, writing, teaching, and critical practice. Rather than attribute the canonicity of well-known Indian English writers to their market success, she illuminates the interpersonal, institutional, and pedagogical dynamics that return certain texts and debates to syllabi, anthologies, and classrooms"--