Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone
Speakers:
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of English, Rice University
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/29 Sep/Houston)
Venue: On Zoom
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’s Overdetermined 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.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University. She is a co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023), author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025), and co-author of The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir (2025). Her book of essays on collectivity, What is We?, is forthcoming.
Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham University Press, 2020) and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2020).
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