Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Oct 8, 2025

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, an Assistant Professor at Rice University, delves into the complexities of identity in Indian English literature. She discusses the resistance to ethnic labeling faced by authors like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, and the implications of 'accented reading' in understanding texts. Srinivasan also reflects on the influence of theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha in shaping scholarship, while advocating for the relevance of literature in today's critical discourse.

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INSIGHT

Accent As A Relational Lens

Accent is not a fixed identity trait but a relation constructed between reader/listener and text.
Accented reading attends to how readers co-create identity when approaching literature.

ADVICE

Apply Accented Reading Method

Use accented reading as a method when teaching or analyzing minority literatures.
Focus on the reader-writer relation and how identity is co-constructed rather than assumed.

INSIGHT

Scholarship Can Be Overdetermined

Overdetermination describes scholars' multiple pressures to respond identitarianly to minority literatures.
Overdetermined scholars must often produce distance from their object rather than proximity.

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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: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) 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.

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.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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