Full Description
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.
Contents
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
