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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
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Morteza Hajizadeh
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. I'm your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Rockini Tharoor Srinivasan about a recent book that she has published with Columbia University Press. The book we are going to discuss today is called Over How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial and Anglophone. Dr. Rogini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays include the essays what is we publishing 2025. And she has also co edited a book called Thinking with an Accent Towards a New Object, Method and practice published in 2023. And there is already a podcast on New Books Network about this book which I encourage you to listen to. Ragini welcome to New Books Network.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to talk about the book. Marthesa thank You.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Thanks. Before we start talking about the book, can I just very briefly introduce yourself? Talk about how you became interested in your field of expertise, which is English literature and postcolonialism, and how the idea of this book came to you.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Absolutely. So, as Martheza said, my name is Ragini Thurik Srinivasan. I'm an English professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas. And this book is essentially a product of 20 years of experience that I had as a student of literature and cultural studies and as a teacher, a professor of literature and cultural studies. I grew up in the Indian American diaspora in the United States. I grew up writing for an Indian American ethnic magazine. And I was always very interested in, you know, I didn't have the language for it as a child, but I was interested in ethnic and diasporic literature and cultural practice production. And then I went to college. I was at Duke University, and I was in the literature department, which was a very unusual place. So it was, you know, literature as opposed to English. It was not exactly comparative literature. Faculty and students were working in something that we might provisionally describe as critical theory and cultural studies. And I just had the incredible experience of being turned on to theory, being introduced to feminist theory and postcolonial theory in particular. And it kind of set me on the path that I am on now. But before I went to graduate school, I went back to the ethnic media, and I worked as a magazine editor and a freelance journalist for a couple of years. And that was like an incredible education for me in thinking expansively about audience beyond sort of our. Our traditional academic and scholarly audiences. So I was writing and editing pieces for a wide variety of both Indian and non Indian, South Asian and non South Asian American and non American readers. And then I went to graduate school and did a PhD in a department of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, which was also, you know, a slightly unusual place. Some. Some listeners might know the rhetoric department. It's not rhetoric as in rhetoric and comp, as we sometimes hear the phrase, but it was a department in which folks were also working kind of broadly in different bodies of theory and cultural production. A close colleague of mine in that department, with whom I would later write a pandemic memoir, was working on Plato, and I was working on contemporary Asian American and South Asian Anglophone literature. So it was quite an unusual kind of place. All of which is to say I came out of, you know, literature and rhetoric. And the field in which I was legible was the field of English. So the discipline of English in which I actually had no degrees, and I became an English professor. And so this book that I've written, which is my first academic monograph, over determined how Indian English literature becomes ethnic, postcolonial and Anglophone. This book is really a cultural study of literary studies and in some sense, of American English departments as I have inhabited them and learned from them, and learned specifically through the practice of being an English professor over the last many years. So I said at the top that the book is sort of a product of 20 years of experience. It's a product of and a reflection on my experience in five specific research universities. It's a book that uses Indian English literature as a case study, describing it as an object that always appears in the drag of the ethnic, post colonial or Anglophone right to use to sort of reference my big wordy subtitle. It's an object that never wears its own name. And so part of the project of this book has been to think about how I have again read, studied, written about, transacted, resisted, worked with this quantity. Indian English literature as an Indian American, as an English professor, as an Anglophone over the course of the last many years. Maybe a little bit more of an intro.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
That was wonderful. Actually. You have. I'm glad you. Because the introduction actually sets the tone beautifully for the book. And you have a lot of wonderful concepts in the book that I'm keen to know more about. And I guess that kind of ties in with the introduction you provided. And one of them, which I really like, is the idea of accented reading, which is you introducing your introduction, which is a method of examining text and how identity shapes production and reception of literature, which I guess echoes, you know, the introduction you mentioned. But I'm interested to know more about that idea of accented reading, what it means and how it also challenges traditional ways that we approach literary criticism.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
No, thank you for that question. So accented reading is absolutely the methodological intervention or contribution of this book. It's something that I'm trying to model. It's not a retrospective description of how I've taught, but it's what I try to produce in every chapter of this book. So I think in order to answer your question, though, let me just back up a little bit. So accented reading is. Accented reading is a sort of concept that I try to develop based on work that I've done in collaboration with other scholars, actually, who you mentioned at the top on the concept of accent itself. So if I can just take a few seconds to talk about this, you know, what is accent an Accent is something that everybody has. You have an accent, I have an accent. And yet we, you know, generally speaking, there are ideas about some subjects being accented and others not being accented. We think that accent is a kind of identitarian tell. But actually what my collaborators and I argue in the book, thinking with an accent, an accent is actually something that sounds at first as if it marks the identity of a speaker or writer, but in fact it actually resides in the ear and the eye of the listener or the reader. So accent is, I think, a concept that allows us actually to change the way we think about identity and to intervene in how we understand something like what it means to read difference or what it means to locate ethnic identity in a text or geographical specificity in a text. So, so, you know, of course I spend more time elaborating this in length in the book. But so accented reading then becomes a mode of reading that is not a mode of reading for quote unquote, the identity of the text, but a mode of reading that attends to the co creation of the idea of identity. So it's a mode of reading that cues us to the construction of the positions from which we as readers approach text. So, so maybe if I can even just quote a line from the book, you know, what I call accented reading is not simply a reading of a text, it's not simply a reading of a text, but it's a reading of a relation to a text and an account of a journey with a text. Right? A journey sort of toward the text or away from it. So, so it might all sound a little abstract. So I'll say one more thing. You know, this is a mode of literary discourse analysis that, you know, I think is especially attentive to relationships between readers and writers and also later, you know, something we can talk about teachers and students, because so much of the ways in which, you know, literature that is sort of read under the signs of the ethnic, post colonial, Anglophone, in sort of us academe, so much of it is read in identitarian terms and in terms of the ways in which writers reject burdens of representation and the ways in which we scholars also, you know, feel kind of oftentimes embattled by our own identitarian relationships to the text. And so accent and accented reading becomes a way of thinking about relation, thinking about the kind of cross pollinating relation between writers and readers that, you know, has a kind of event status and gives us a different way of thinking about how we might want to or actually already are approaching literary texts in our work.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I think it's a fascinating. I sort of identify with that as well because I study English literature myself. I'm originally from Iran and people tell me that I have an American accent every now and then. And to me it became an identitarian thing. I wasn't deliberately trying to mimic that, but I learned my English through classic movies and studying English literature sort of reinforced that I, in some people's mind. And it might be a different thing here, I might be taking it to a different direction, but when I was reading the book and the idea of accented reading, it echoed with me that some people assume that I'm deliberately trying to put up this accent to distance myself from my identity. And my act of studying English literature sort of reinforced that idea. And on the other hand, I knew other people, mainly in political department studies that were doing, who were studying and they deliberately had their own, they deliberately had an accent, not an American or British accent. They had their own accent. They didn't want to pronounce some words correctly because the ideal accent was resistance, maintaining their own identity. Like I said, it's a different thing a bit here, but it echoed with me when I was reading the book.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
No, it's very related.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
No, it's totally related, right? Because, you know, there's, there's a way in which accent, again, we think it's a certain kind of identitarian tell, but it's, it's conscious, it's unconscious, it's performative, it's co. Created. And what somebody hears in your voice, right, as an American accent, somebody else is going to hear as an Iranian accent and somebody else is sitting here as something else. And it tells us as much about the listener as it tells us about you. Right? In fact, but, but what it might tell us about you or you know, to, to quote Lawrence Abu Hamdan, scholar and artist, you know, it's a kind of biography of migration, right? It's a sort of, it's the journey of everything that we have read and heard and watched and it sort of, it become lives in our voices, right? And so for me, as a, as a, as a scholar of English literature and as, as the writer of this book, you know, I've want, I've been wanting to think with that knowledge of accent and its complexity when I read these texts, right, that are, that are called Indian English, right, But, but what does that mean, right, When I, when I append that name to a text, you know, what do I mean by Indian, right? Like, what do I hear in the voice of the text that reads to me as Indian, you know, and, and how does the writer, anticipating the way that they're going to be heard, right. Try to cue the reading or try to displace the reading or anticipate the reading? Because we're all always doing that when we speak and when we read and when we write, you know, we're either approaching our audience or we might even be kind of rejecting it. So I mean, what you said is exactly on point.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
And it's sort of. And it's sort of. And I like the idea that it's a. What does it mean? Indian literature? What does it mean? British literature? I've observed Persian literature, studied translations of bits and pieces of Indian literature, Chinese literature, British literature, American literature, and to me, some of them, most of the texts that I've read, those great works of literature are so universal I can identify with them. There are similar stories in my literature as well. But that label, whether it's Indian, American, British, that already even predisposes you to a specific form of judgment or reading the text in a specific way. Let me ask you another question about the title of the book, Over Determined. I'm keen to know what it means. What do you mean by over determined and that relationship that a scholar like you, for example, has when it comes to literary fields, especially, you know, especially something like Indian literature, which is a minority literary field in the Anglophone world, and how it shapes your relation to that, to the text of your study when you approach it as an over determined scholar. And it would be great if you could unpack that, that idea.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Absolutely, absolutely. So I, yeah, when, when I, you know, so over. Over determination in the scholarly discourse, you know, many listeners will know, you know, it, it can, it sometimes is used in, you know, a Marxist sense, sometimes in a Freudian sense. There are a lot of sort of technical definitions of the term. And I try to say very clearly that I'm using the term over determination in order to cue us to its not just colloquial significations, but its, but it's rhetorical significations and also to a specific kind of over determination, a kind of multiple causality that follows scholars, you know, a form of over determination via what I call, you know, identitarian interpolation. So, okay, that was a lot of big jargony words. So let me back up and say in a different way, when we read ethnic and postcolonial literature, Anglophone literature, what we were just talking about, right. Indian Literature, Asian literature, whatever, whatever kind of minority discourse or literature in, in the U.S. academy, we're very familiar with the idea that the liter, the writers of the literature face a burden of representation, right? They're, they're, they are over determined by the ethnic and national and, and sometimes linguistic terms and signs under which they're read. They are burdened by demands to quote, unquote, represent their communities. They are burdened by the demand for authenticity. They are burdened by demands for a certain kind of fidelity to the reader's understanding of what it means to be something like Indian or African or Asian and so forth. And I think as scholars of ethnic and post colonial literature, we have actually done a ton of work to understand the burden of representation, but we have done less work. And this is where my book steps in to understand the kinds of over determination that we as scholars, right, Ethnic, postcolonial and Anglophone scholars working on non Western literature. How do we understand the ways in which we are over determined by a kind of identitarian interpolation that demands that we respond to a certain kind of hail from minority literatures in the U, especially in, you know, and this is the frame of the book, the US academic context. So I use over determined and over determination as a, as a term with which to revisit what has become frankly a very kind of hoary topic in English literary studies. And that's the topic of identity and identity politics. You know, I use over determination as a figure with which to think about the move in ethnic and postcolonial literary studies in the US the move towards a kind of post identitarianism, right. It's very, it's very popular, for example, for post colonialists or let's say Asian Americanists and the two main fields I work in. It's very popular to say, you know, I reject identity, right? It's very popular to make comments like, you know, I am. I don't want to be pejorative. I don't want to be engaged in the acting, in doing a research that can be legible as something like me search. It's very popular to say that, you know, I'm not interested on an authorial biography. It's very popular to say, well, I'm not studying Indian English literature just because I'm Indian. And all of those things may be true, but they're, but they always risk throwing, you know, the kind of bathwater or what is that, throwing the baby of, of identity out with the bathwater of bad identity politics. Instead, I think we need to think very seriously about the affordances of identity and specifically of our positions as scholars who are hailed into certain kinds of relationships with texts by something that looks and sounds identitarian and take that very seriously. Just say two more things about this. I would 100% agree with, with I think a very sort of commonsensical idea that, that many of us share, which is, you know, just because you're Indian doesn't mean you know anything about Indian literature. This is of course true, right? And know representation does not equal, you know, is not necessarily a political advancement. I mean we have very sophisticated critiques of identity politics for a reason. But there is something specific about the experience of a scholar and I use my own example and I generalize from it and I also put it in relationship to other scholars. You know, Ray Chao's work on the pro, the protesting ethnic, you know, Gayatri Spivak's coinage about the native informant. You know, I situate my position as a kind of over determined scholar in relationship to a lot of these really seminal ideas. Ideas, you know, the, the Indian who, who's working on Indian literature, right, or the Indian American working on Indian English literature does not know anything better about the literature by virtue of their Indianness. But what I'm interested in is though is the kind of relationship that scholar has to, has to articulate to the object. And, and one of the ways I describe this is that a scholar who's over determined by a certain kind of identitarian correspondence to their object, they don't have to produce proximity to the object the way someone who engages in language study to approach their object does, or the way someone who engages in a certain kind of field work has to produce, you know, proximity to their object. Instead, the over determined scholar has to produce a kind of distance from the object. And I'm very interested in this distance and this distance as a place from which we do and might enact literary studies. Maybe I'll stop there because I'm going to probably start repeating the same thing. But it's a kind of thorny, it's a thorny subject, I think. I think frankly it's sort of a touchy subject. And in the intro to the book I describe it as kind of an open secret that we had a hard time dealing with in literature. I think.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
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- [21:28]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
At the Home Depot.
- [21:33]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Right. Well, I must say one thing I liked about your book is that it's not purely theoretical. You did discuss a lot of authors and theorists as well, and you tried to show us your ideas, analyzing their work. And to me the good thing was that I was not familiar with some of these writers works and reading your book has actually prompted me to read their stories as well. And let's talk about one of them that you discussed in chapter one, the Multi Ethnic Literature. And you discuss, I hope I'm pronouncing the name correctly, Bharati Mukhreji or Mukerji, I'm sure. I'm sorry if I say Mukherjee. Sorry, sorry if I'm butchering the name. You talk about her rejection of ethnic identity and how that reshapes our understanding of multi ethnic literature because she has embraced that unhyphenated American identity. And you discussed that through some of her works such as the Middleman and Other stories. Would be great if you could talk about how she, let's say, how she rejects that ethnic identity, what it tells us about the idea of multi ethnic literature and how it shows itself. And we don't want to spoil these stories for the listeners who want to read your book and also read this story and it shows itself in her writing style and also some of the themes in the book. In the book you specifically discuss.
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Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Sure, sure. No, I would love to. I know, I love that. I love that you said let's not spoil the stories. And so, so actually maybe before I talk about Bharati Mukherjee, I'll just very quickly say something about the form of the book and maybe we'll come back to this later. But I'll just, I'll throw it out there right now. So you know, so the book, I described it as a cultural study of literary studies. And so on the one hand it take, it looks the book appears as in the form of something familiar in Literary Studies, which is the author focused monograph. So there are four chapters that focus on writers of Indian English literature. Bharati Mukherjee, Chetan Bhagat, Amit Choudhary and Jhumpa Lahiri. And I sort of, I explain at some length why these four authors, but just sort of like for shorthand purposes, Bharati Mukherjee is the writer with whom I think about the construction of the Ethnic Chetan Bhagat is the writer with whom I think about the construction of the Anglophone. Amit Chowdhury is the writer with whom I think about the construction of the postcolonial. And Jhupa Lahiri is the writer with whom I think about the construction of the post Anglophone. And, you know, and I'm very interested in how these writers, you know, or the ways in which they might help us to rethink or, or differently understand or specify these categories and how Indian English literature has been implicated, you know, in, in. In their production and in, in debates about them. Right. The book also has three chapters that are sort of like short half chapters or inter chapters that are about the sort of big three. Postcolonial theorists. Spivak Baba and Saeed will probably talk about them. And then the book also, every chapter is framed by a kind of pedagogical and or institutional situation. So I'll say more about that later. But I say all of that just to say so the Bharati Mukherjee chapter is about this question of the American accent versus the Indian accent, sort of broadly defined. And now Bharati Mukherjee, who passed away actually just a few years ago, she's kind of considered the seminal Asian American writer. She was considered by many to be sort of the Indian American literary pioneer of her time, you know, sort of writing in the, you know, mid to late, you know, 20th century. She also was an early writer in what is now known as sort of the program era. So she came out of the Iowa Creative Writing Workshop. She also has a PhD. She taught at Berkeley for many years. And you know, to go to your question, she very famously did not want to be considered an Indian writer. She didn't want to be considered Indian. She didn't want to be considered Indian American. She didn't want to be considered post colonial. She didn't want to be considered multi ethnic. She said, you know, I'm an American and sort of, in part because of this sort of, sort of a certain kind of assimilationist politics that she had. You know, she's someone who's considered kind of to have bad politics. She's sort of a liberal feminist and assimilationist. She writes very particular kinds of immigrant stories. And, you know, she's an interesting character to me because she rejected ethnic identification in order to write her way into the American, you know, the 20th century American literary canon. And she became an Asian American mainstay precisely because of the ways she rejected the field. And so I sort of am interested in thinking about her Because I think she complicates our understanding of how something like coercive mimeticism functions. Right. So coercive mimeticism, you know, I'm using Ray Chow's term from the Protestant ethnic and the spirit of capitalism. You know, it's, you know, in Chao's terms, it's a certain kind of imperative to resemble the ethnic self. Right. That all ethnic subjects under sort of the conditions of American multiculturalism end up having to perform. And Mukherjee rejects the sort of, a certain kind of coercive mimetic imperative and yet takes on a different and related project of ventriloquizing the American voice. So, so I sort of, I, I explore these topics with reference to a class that I taught on accent in which Mukherjee figured. And, you know, I have a lot of fun kind of playing with, with her as someone who invited a certain kind of reading, rejected a certain kind of reading, you know, thinking about, you know, why and when we might want to read her under signs like ethnic and Asian American. Yeah, so that's kind of what I'm doing with her. Maybe I'll stop there.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, I think that's a good description of her. Like I said, she's quite famous. She was quite famous. She's still famous. I have an. Unfortunately, I hadn't read anything from her, but I'm encouraged to read more after I've read your chapter. I'm also interested in Spivak. I study English literature and I'm a huge fan of post colonial theory, and I've kind of distanced myself from post colonial theory in more recent years. I've become a little bit critical of that. But I love the foundation of the work that was laid and of course, the work of Spivak as well. To me, this was the most fascinating chapter of the book because Spivak had had a lot of influence on me when I was a student. You discuss your encounters with her, you discuss her as a theorist and also as a symbol, which I really love that description of her, how her presence, her accent, her identity has become this kind of symbolic presence in academia. And you also discussed that the accent is not really just linguistic, but it's ideological. This is a really dense chapter, but I'll leave it to you to give us an idea of what you discussed and what you mean by her presence as a very famous theorist, post Corona theorist, who has had an enduring impact and who is still around. What do you mean by her being a symbolic, let's say, presence in academia.
- [28:46]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Yes, thank you so. And and very much around. And, and maybe I can, I can start, start chatting, talking about Spivak by saying that this chapter, this little inter. Chapter, I call it a recess about Spivak. I can say why in a second. It's called. You wouldn't say this to, you wouldn't say that to Gayathri Spivak. And I'm sure everything I'm about to say also, I, I wouldn't want to say to Gayatri Spivak. But, but so, so, so I mentioned, you know, I, I have these little chapters that are about Guy to Chakravarti Spivak, Homi Baba and Edward Said, who you know, many of you will know, Robert JC Young called the holy trinity of colonial discourse analysis. Right. So they're sort of like the big three post colonial icons. I mean, you know, Morte, you called them symbols, which I think is very true. And, and, and they're very interesting to me. I'll talk about Spivak specifically in a second. You know, the three of them are very interesting to me because, you know, any, any effort in this, in this historical moment, I think to reckon with the, the sort of foundational texts of post colonial studies, the legacy of postcolonial studies, the problems with postcolonial studies, you know, it's often routed through some relationship to these three major thinkers. And of course, you know, when I say postcolonial, I can put a little asterisk and say I'm still primarily talking about postcolonialism in its American dispensation because of course, the postcolonial is a sign that reads very differently in different contexts, linguistic, national and otherwise. And there is not one post colonial. But since my book is about Indian English literature, I'm thinking about a certain dominant strand of postcolonial literary inquiry in which Spivak, for example, is absolutely key. And just one more thing before I say something about Spivak. You know, Spivak Baba and said they're, they were symbols and icons and remain so not just in terms of their, their work as postcolonialists, even though, you know, I think they all differently rejected the, the sign of the post colonial or you know, at least complicated it and often rejected it. But Spivak, you know, invites us to rethink questions around academic celebrity, you know, Baba invites us to rethink questions, the question of theory and bad writing and you know, Saeed invites us to rethink, you know, public intellectualism, I think. And, and, but they all are kind of doing all of that Work. So. So back to Spivak. So Spivak is someone who, I think I first really try to think about, you know, the production of her iconicity in a certain kind of afterlife of theory. And I try to wrestle with, you know, what she has come to represent in the US Academy broadly, and then two departments of English in particular. And, you know, maybe I should also say that I do this work in these three little chapters by reading, you know, interviews, paratext, you know, kind of reading around them as opposed to, you know, going back and trying to do some original exegesis of can the subaltern speak? Or something like that. Like, that's not the project of this chapter. It's really to think about the production of iconicity. And, you know, so Spivak in particular, right. If you think about Spivak and mortis, I'd be curious, you know, what. What you think about it. Right? But when you think Spivak, you think, you know, can the subaltern speak? And the way that that question speaks still, you know, determines and over determines the questions we ask in post colonial studies, right. You think about her disavowal of the post colonial. You think about the subject position of the native informant. You think about her commitment to multilingualism and to, you know, language learning and a certain commitment to theory. You think about Spivak's kind of charisma and the charisma of these, again, iconic, not just postcolonial theorists, but feminist theorists, queer theorists, right, who were part of staging and performing and enacting the disruptive event of theory, you know, in the 1980s and then in the 1990s, and it was an event. And so for folks like me coming up in the 2000s, we're always already working and writing and reading after that event. And I'm very interested in, you know, in I maybe this. I don't know if this is unfair, but I think it's become very popular to criticize a figure like Spivak. And. And there's a lot of frustration with a figure like Spivak, I would say, without naming any names amongst, you know, colleagues of mine, frustration, I would say, in the United States right now, in this moment with some of these iconic figures who, you know, were writing and working, you know, sort of in the post, in the heyday of post structuralism, who were supposed radicals. And we're in this really, really nasty time politically. And people have been asking, you know, well, where, where are they? You know, at the same time, Spivak has also been Criticized, you know, in India, in South Asia, for, for some of, you know, I tell this story in the book but you know, for certain kinds of disciplining and even accent policing, you know, she has done in India. And you know, she calls herself very self consciously, I think, and self consciousness critically, she has described herself as a cast and class enemy from abroad when she returns to, to, to, to India, you know, to speak. And, and so, so, so, you know, there's more without just telling stories. You know, I think I'm very, I'm, I'm very interested. You know, I'm not. This, this, my chapter about Spivak is not a critique of Spivak. It's very much trying to think about why do we again, as people reading and writing and learning and teaching and a figure like Smivak, like what lessons did we take from her arrival into the academy? Why does she frustrate us? What did we want from her and what can she teach us still? And so certainly some, you know, her, her commitment, for example, to multilingual pedagogy in this moment in which in the U.S. academy Language programs are being closed, language literatures are, you know, underfunded, understudied language requirements are disappearing, humanities programs more generally are embattled. The death of comparative literature that we've been talking about for 25 years, you know, is, is, is, is, is newly relevant. And, and so I'm really interested in, in what we might still learn from her, how departments of English might be able to, you know, be adequate to also Spivak's commitment to rigorous pedagogy. And you know, I think Spivak's example, you know, among others is one of the reasons that like I, you know, my book is, you know, this is not a book about teaching, but every part of this book is also trying to think about and think through teaching in relationship to research and to think about how teaching and research are always in relation. And that's something that I, you know, I learned and I think many people learn from Spivak. So last thing, sorry, I feel like I'm going on too long. But you know, I'm very interested also again, as a, as a scholar who came up in the early 2000s and as an English professor in the year 2025 who has an investment in, in, in, in in the future and in a future for literary studies and a future for post colonial inquiry. You know, I think if we dismiss and get rid of all of all of our canonical thinkers and teachers and theorists, you know, we will have nothing to. There will be no foundation on which we can continue to build in the future. So I'm really interested in continuing to think with some of these figures who have been so central to our fields.
- [35:56]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You've raised a lot of important points and I do agree with you. I must say, to me, it was refreshing that you have discussed these three authors, Spivak, Homie Baba and Edward Said, because some people say, well, they're just gone. Let's just focus on the present. And I've seen a lot of unjust criticism of Spivak, especially on social media. The moment something about her comes out, about even her personal life. I've seen how she's been attacked and even her famous article, Candice Subaltern Speak is ridiculous, mocked. I'm not familiar with her criticism in India, but I've heard that she's under attack from everywhere. It just raises the question of why. Why did we expect maybe from that radicalism of postcolonial theory or post structures, and that maybe didn't come to fruition? And that might be the source of frustration, which again, goes to the idea of the role of public intellectual, which is something you discuss in your book through the works of Said. But I do think it's important, as you mentioned, to still engage with the works, even with their, let's say, symbolic presence in university, because in this day and age, and you explore it in your book, it's so important, especially with the whole idea of the new structure of managerial universities, the new liberal universities and its emphasis on convenience and product. And I think that Spivak's insistence on multilingualism and that critical reading, it still has something to offer to us. I don't know what you think about this, and would be good if we could talk about how Spiva can help us resist that new liberalization of education and university, which I guess even in the past two years, with Trump's attack on academia, has even become more significant and important, I guess.
- [37:50]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely right. I mean, and, you know, 100%, it's not just convenience, as you're saying. I mean, 100%, but also efficiency. You know, here in the US Academy, there's this sort of, you know, what we call a butts in seats model of budgeting that is sort of gone around infecting every university now where there's all these enrollment pressures, there have, you know, continued to be sort of the intensification of delegitimizing discourses around the humanities education, you know, and of course, it's not just Spivak, but many scholars, including Spivak, who have been trying to think critically and carefully about again, reading language, literature, the encounter with the text, right? What is an aesthetic education? Why? Why? And how do we think about our own positions as privileged readers and writers, right, in a site like an academic institution that is both the enabling condition of our work and something we also have to resist, right? I mean, this is, these are. Again, you know, I think there is a problem amongst, I think many progressives. I won't, again, I won't, I won't, I won't name any names, right? But we do a lot of self flagellation about our sort of like guilt and complicity and, you know, this and that. And in this moment, like there's no time, I think, for, for self flagellation and, and guilt about our positions, right? We need to, from wherever we are, we have to do whatever we can to defend the things that matter to us, right? And as educators and teachers and scholars of English literature, right, like, what matters to me is that the next generations of students, right, are able to have these incredible rich and rigorous and responsible, you know, experiences with texts and textuality and, and the encounters with otherness, the encounters with themselves, the, you know, experience of thinking about something like translation. You know, we have to really, I think, defend and fight for, fight for, for, for, for books. You know, I mean, of course, all of this is also, you know, I will just admit, you know, to the listener and to you, right? For me, a lot of this now is shadowed in a way by the kind of AI hype and AI discourse that I, that I don't deal with at length in my book, but which I do reference, you know, the book was written before, you know, the last, I would say, especially year of, of hype. But, but I think again, rather than sort of chastising Spivak or, you know, the, you know, Edward Said, who of course has, is, you know, passed away, you know, over 20 years ago and others for their positions and for their complicities and so forth, which is part of what, what they get criticized for. You know, let's not, let's not think about what they failed to do. Let's think about what they, you know, enabled us to ask and, and what kind of model they set. You know, and the same thing about Homie Baba, you know, a different, a different figure who represents something different. But, but I think a kind of similar argument about him. Maybe, maybe a little bit less impassioned though.
- [40:39]
Morteza Hajizadeh
All right? And I guess that also goes to what I said earlier, because I'm. I used to be trying to post Corona literature. I've become a little bit more critical of it. But I do not deny the importance of foundational impact. People like Spivak, Edward Said had me. And I do realize the importance of that discourse, what they enable us to do to give us this critical lens to look at discourse. Let's go to Homi Baba. He's another controversial figure who's always been accused of being too difficult to read, who's been accused of having a horrible style of writing, bad writing, because he wanted to be a poet. I read somewhere at some stage, but anyway, that might account for his bad writing. I don't know. But I must say, from all these three theories that you mentioned, I've read say the most. And then Homie Baba. I'm sorry, and then sp, like in the 30s, homie baba. And maybe that's because I've read secondary sources on Homie Baba. Maybe I was too much afraid of that style of writing myself. But tell us how those accusations.
- [41:44]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
First.
- [41:45]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Of all, why do you think they're still relevant? They still provoke reaction, let's say, and those accusations are bad writing, how do they intersect with the idea of, you know, academic authority, race, gender in general?
- [42:00]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Yeah, yeah, totally. No, no great questions. And, you know, to what you said a little bit earlier, Right. And this is the same, you know, when I was, when I was discussing this book with potential oppresses and stuff, and I had some of these conversations. You say a name like Homie Baba and, you know, Homie Baba, who's still very much, you know, alive and working, you say a name like Homie Baba and oftentimes you'll get a kind of eye roll and people will say, oh, is anybody still reading, Bob? You know, is anybody still reading, you know, is everybody still reading this? Is he kind of done and passe and. Yeah, and I, and I, you know, and I've heard that reaction from people. And in fact, in my book, you know, I was talking about how all the chapters are framed by different institutional and pedagogical situations and the one that frames the Baba chapter, you know, and it's all true. These are all true things. I mean, this book also, I just, if I can just say there is a kind of principle of radical integrity that in this book, even when I look bad or make myself look bad, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's entirely honest. So, so anyway, so there's, there's a, you know, I had a graduate student at the University of Arizona where I used to teach, who was doing a qualifying exam for his PhD in English literature. And he had a field list in post colonial theory. And he asked me, do I really have to read Baba? I don't want to read Baba. Baba is horrible to read. And don't I kind of already know what Baba said about hybridity and mimicry and so forth? Do I really have to read him? And this kind of, it was such an interesting moment because, you know, my instinct was to say, like, yes, of course you have to read him, right? But then, but then the answer is, you know, and then the second question I had, of course, for myself was what? Why, why, why? Why am I going to make my student read this text? Right? I mean, you have to have a good reason. And, you know, some of it has to do with, you know, I think my investment and interest in all of us who again, are working after these oppositional knowledge projects from the 80s and 90s, right, that were interventions that were cannon busters that were, you know, again, like part of the event of theory. Like, if those texts and those interventions and those books and those authors are part of our foundation, like it behooves us to, to make them foundational, right, and, and to, and to justify their reading otherwise, you know, either a future for our field. So there's sort of that kind of thing. But then with Baba specifically, you know, he was, he was, he's always accused of bad writing, of being very hard to understand. You know, Spivak often is to other scholars, Judith Butler, I mean, many others of them, you know, they won those bad writing contests which were totally in bad faith, but, you know, back in the day, But I, I, I, in the, in the book and, you know, this is kind of to, to pull out a little bit. I'm very interested in arguments around bad writing and jargon and, and how it relates to a few different things. So one is, you know, I think probably the frustration with Baba's, you know, we sort of, I think started talking about this already, is that there's this sense that, you know, Baba's arguments, for example, about the performative disruptions of the pedagogical, right, like they were supposed to be radical, they were supposed to subvert power, they were supposed to be disruptive. And so there, on the one hand, there's this kind of frustration, like, did theory change the world or are we, like, worse off than we were before? So this is kind of frustration that, you know, I mean, again, when you think about the performative and the pedagogical, we know, we know the careers of the performative, right? That's a kind of concept and, and it's frustrating, but it makes us need to ask again questions that are absolutely at the heart of literary studies, right? Like Hannah, text change the world? Can literature change the world? Right. What are the politics of textual analysis? And what kind of politics is rooted in textual analysis? Right? Like these are fundamental questions. And I think, you know, engaging again or engaging anew with a figure like Baba gives us a chance to re, ask these questions. I also would say that, you know, you know, and this is, I'm generalizing here, but in, in, in the U.S. academy, I think in this moment and in my experience of it in the last 10 years, there's a kind of fetish and, and I know I'm using that, that kind of, that word, but there's a kind of fetish for ideas around accessibility and wide address. There's some, you know, been the kind of the rise of the public humanities. There are a lot of criticisms of the humanities that sort of imply that we have not been scientific or scientistic enough. There are a lot of folks in the humanities who feel we need to defend ourselves and that part of the reason why we can't justify our existence is because we haven't done a good job speaking a language that is intelligible to others. And you know, I think these are, I think these are really kind of problematic and interesting arguments again, that we need to look very closely and critically at. Because if you look at fields again, like post colonial theory, where we did try to build up a certain kind of technical vocabulary and a, a certain kind of armature of discipline specific argot, we got criticized for being inaccessible, but now, you know, we are, we are at the same time criticized for not for not being able to defend something like the, you know, the meaning and value and status of our sort of expert knowledge as knowledge. So, you know, I'm pulling a little clumsily a few threads together, but you know, I'm particularly interested in the book in what, how Baba enables us to ask these kinds of questions. And oh yeah, I remember you said, you know, they're absolutely tied up in questions around academic authority and they're totally racialized and gendered because of course, again, the question is like who, who can have or claim authority? And, and related to that word, authority, right, is also this question of expertise, right? What does it mean to be an expert and an Expert in what? You know, we're in this moment right now of, you know, profound deskilling of educators broadly and humanists specifically, in which, you know, you have these kind of, these tech. Tech guys are running around saying, you know, my LLM has the, you know, is smarter than a PhD. Right. There's, I mean, and I. That's maybe sounds a little trivial, but if you kind of really think about what that means, it's a, It's a really deep devaluation of a certain kind of knowledge. And so how do we articulate humanistic knowledge as knowledge? And how do we defend, you know, something like postcolonial theory or literary theory that maybe didn't exactly change or reshape the world in certain ways that we thought it might? How do we nevertheless account for the tremendous contribution that. That these texts and books and works and arguments made to the way do we think about, for example, race and gender and the, and the. And the distinction between, you know, difference and diversity. Right. You know, these were key questions. Just because they're not politically in fashion right now doesn't mean we should dispense with them. We should remember why they were important and what they were meant to do, not what they didn't achieve.
- [48:37]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You're absolutely right. And I guess I think it's perfect time now to talk about Edwards and the idea of public intellectual activism, political engagement, because some of these authors that we mentioned, Homi Baba or Spivak, despite the fact that all the great writing they've done, they might be accused of just being in the ivory tower and detached. I don't think that anybody can make that comment about Edward Said. He wrote about the role of public intellectuals. He performed that role. He was under constant threat when he was teaching at Columbia. His legacy still remains, despite the fact that he passed away more than 20 years ago, as you mentioned earlier. I'm interested to know what can his legacy teach us about the role of public intellectuals, especially today, that the academia is under threat. That academia is being criticized both from within, legitimate criticism from people who are teaching within, and also from un. Legitimate criticism, I feel, from the people who are outside populist politicians. What can his legacy tell us about the role of public intellectuals and also commitment to political engagement through that academic authority that they had or public intellectuals have.
- [49:55]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Yeah, no, absolutely right. And I mean, you've already sort of like sketched. Sketched the terrain really beautifully. You know, Edward Said has this really outsized role and reputation again in the academic humanities. He is, he is. You know, there Are very. There are a few. You can count them on one hand. Maybe sort of these iconic, you know, thinkers and, you know, from the world of literary studies, but also more broadly from. From the contemporary youth academy, who. Who represent to many of us the ideals of public intellectualism, broadly, but then also specifically, you know, the reasons why many of us, you know, and I include you and me, I mean, people. And, you know, even though we haven't talked about this, Martez, if you don't mind, like, why do people like us go to do PhDs, right. Or study. Sure. Right. I say this in the book, but it's. It's. It's. It's not because, you know, we are trying to, you know, we could go, you know, it's not because we're trying to make money. It's not because we're trying to, you know, I don't know, become famous. It's not because we're trying to, you know, I don't know, whatever. I guess I'm trying to decide which profession I should. I should demean here, and maybe I won't. I'll just stay away from that. But the point is, we go, right, because of a commitment to the text, because of a belief in the relationship between the text and the world. We go because we want to maybe speak truth to power. We go because we want to engage with students. We go because we want to have, you know, To. To have a knowledge to share with the world. You know, like. And these are all things that Edward Said wrote about, Edward Said talked about. Edward Said modeled, right. A mode of intellectual engagement and public responsibility that was about, you know, you learn what you can and then you present it to the world in some way. Right. I mean, that's a kind of crass paraphrase of some things that he said. But whether it's on a podcast, whether it's in a book, whether it's in a journal article, whether it's in a conference. Right? We are all, you know, we are doing this work because we. We feel a responsibility and a desire to. To. To. To. To learn and share and be in conversation and try to do some good. Right? So. So Saeed is so, so, so Saeed, I think, you know, he's iconic for that reason. And then, of course, you know, he's his. He was always under attack, as you said, you know, because he's a staunch defender of Palestinian human rights, which, of course, is, you know, a vital topic of the. Of this. Of this moment. And he was. And he was someone who, you know, he was called by someone, you know, like the bulletproof intellectual. Right. He seemed somehow to be able to move between worlds. But in the chapter that I write about him, the little chapter, you know, one of the things I'm interested in kind of putting pressure on is this idea that Edward Said is someone who kind of uniquely or distinctly was able to sort of like combine politics and pedagogy or sort of marry the world of his scholarship with the world of public intellectualism in a way that others didn't or haven't. Because I think part. What part of what I'm interested in thinking about, you know, with reference to the example of Said, was the way that he. His public intellectualism was nevertheless in some ways reliant upon the separation of spheres between his public facing work and his, you know, academic pedagogy and work at, you know, at Columbia. Right. Like, in a certain sense. And, you know, I'm making this argument somewhat heuristically, but I think those worlds were in certain. And, you know, you could read this and how he talked about himself, they were quite separate. And so in this moment, right, you were asking me, you know, what about the role of the public intellectual today? I think the, the irony is in, in this moment, we have a lot of public intellectuals. We actually have a lot of brilliant public facing, semi public, you know, articles, arguments, journal issues, books, multimedia presentations. Like, we are not lacking for public intellectualism in this moment. We're not lacking for really brilliant, accessible, you know, beautifully written prose. Right. On the model of Said and not on the model of Baba. Right. We are not lacking for that kind of work in this moment, but what we are lacking is a profession. What we are dealing with right now is the evisceration of the profession that allowed for a figure like Edward Said to emerge. And what I mean by that is, you know, a profession that actually retains its students, that employs them, you know, with a living wage, with the protections of tenure, with, you know, all of these things. This is the moment and era of, you know, ongoing adjunctification. And, and, and we have not, again, speaking kind of in broad terms as, as an academy, as a profession, we have not. We have not retained and therefore not earned the respect and the fidelity and the loyalty of the generation of generations of students who we have trained and dispensed with. And so Said's example, I think, you know, is. Is. Is. So what I'm kind of learning from Said and what I kind of try to present in the book is it's not that we all need to be better public intellectuals? I mean, many of us do, and we can think about that, but actually, what kind of profession do we need to be in order to do right by someone like Edward Said and his legacy? Right. I guess I would add one more thing, which was that, you know, Said was also a rigorous scholar. Right. An expert. I mean, you think of his, you know, his famous book or evangelism from 1978, the kind of ur text of post colonial studies. It is a product of deep, deep, deep learning and reading and historical research and analysis. Right. I mean, it is, it is not. It is, it, you know, it is an expert. It is a production of a certain, it is the product of a kind of expertise. And I say it in that way because I think we really have to ask ourselves how and when and why, you know, we articulate a sort of broader aspiration to public address in this moment of not just what I described earlier as deskilling, but in this moment of a kind of broad disavowal of expertise. Like I think we as, as again people who have been the beneficiaries of, in many cases, doctoral education or higher education, we have to think really carefully and critically and self critically about what it is we have been given to know and how we can do the best version of that expert work and of that highly trained work and of that scholarly work in order to then. Right. Know what and how to speak to and for, you know, broader publics.
- [56:18]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, I think it was a perfect answer to the question. Thank you. And I must just confess here that I think I'm, I'm not doing justice to the book because in the book, as I mentioned at the beginning, there's a nice mix of theory and practice. You talk about, about some, the theorists, you talk about some writers as well. We only talked about one writer, but I want to, and I deliberately chose questions from writers that I was more or less familiar with. So for the last question, I'm going to go back to an author, Jhumpalahiri, who's one of the most famous writers. It was I guess a few years ago that I heard, I think it was five or six years ago, I don't remember that I heard that she has started learning Italian 2012 actually. But I, I, I heard that a few years later, after, I think it was in 2015, that I heard that she has started and like I said, I'm from Iran and she's hugely, hugely popular in Iran. Her books have been translated. I'm not sure about her more recent books. But she's quite well known in. Even in a country like Iran. And I was really surprised when I heard that she's just started learning Italian to write in Italian. So I'm keen to know about her turn to Italian and what it tells us about the limits of writing in English for diasporic authors such as Zahiri herself, and that linguistic shift, how does it challenge those expectations of ethnic and postcolonial representation?
- [57:47]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So Jupa Lahiri is a really interesting figure, and I think I mentioned sort of earlier that, you know, in. In the book, she represents the post Anglophone. Right. And I mean, and. And, you know, when I say represents, it's all kind of, again, heuristically and playfully, but. Yeah. So Jim Balahari just, you know, for those who. Who might not know her work as well, and to. And to underline what you said, you know, another iconic Indian American writer who became famous when her first book, the Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in the late 1990s. And, you know, she. Her first four books were really centered primarily around the Indian American experience and some might say even more specifically the Bengali American experience that sort of adhered more closely to her own, you know, growing up. And. And what. And, and so Lahiri, I mean, this and this. I'm speaking again, in general terms in the early 2000s, I think it's fair to say, you know, she was someone who was, to use, you know, my book title over determining the field of Indian American literature. You know, every writer who wanted to. Every, you know, Indian woman writer for. And, you know, he remains to this day, who wants to write, you know, fiction. The question is, can they be the next Jhumpa Lahiri? She's someone who. Whose name signifies really powerfully because she. She came to represent some, you know, a certain kind of Asian, American, Indian American and ethnic writing that was highly celebrated. And yet she herself. And she's written about this, right, was very embattled by what I've earlier described in our conversation as a kind of burden of representation. And she chafed. And again, she has written about this, she really chafed against certain kinds of demands that she would do a certain kind of writing and be a certain kind of writer and speak to a certain set of experiences that would be legible as, let's say, Indian American experiences. And so, very fascinatingly, in 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome with her family, and she essentially reinvented herself as an Italian writer. And she's Written about it now in multiple books, in her memoir, In Other Words, most recently in her book of short fiction, Roman Stories. In between, there was a book of essays, translating Myself and others. She's written a book of poetry in Italian. She's translated Italian writers. It's this major big project. And of course, it's not just her project alone, but she's had the benefit of this whole army of, you know, friends and translators and editors and publishers. And there's this whole machinery, right, that operates around Jhumpa Lahiri, the Italian writer. So. So my book is really interested in thinking about that linguistic shift and then also thinking about how that shift to date, right until now, has been received by literary critics. And so I guess I'll flag also for. For the listener who might be interested, a lot of the chapters of the book, and I'll come back to Laura here in a second. A lot of my chapters are metacritical, and they're about literary critics, right? And I count myself among them. They're about how and why we read writers the way we do and also how the writers anticipate the way they're going to be read. So in La, Harry's case, something kind of interesting that happened after she started writing in Italian is, you know, Anglophone literary critics started saying, oh, wow, it's so interesting and refreshing that she has sort of, you know, sloughed off identity questions and sloughed off the post colonial. She's rejecting, you know, all these things she used to do. And the really profound irony of those kinds of claims, right, critical claims that, oh, Lahiri has become a nude writer and she's not writing about what she used to. She's become a different writer, which also she herself has kind of tried to articulate in some complex ways. You know, the irony is that in Italian she's telling the exact same stories she was always telling in English, right? You know, stories of migration and stories of linguistic estrangement and stories of a certain kind of self formation. But she engineered this kind of return to herself via her own linguistic demolition and return, you know, topically. And it's really interesting to me as a dynamic and as a movement and a kind of itinerary, itinerary that speaks to every other writer that I'm writing about in this book and then speaks to my own kind of critical investigation of the way over Determination works as a. As the enabling condition of a certain kind of scholarship in which you have to sort of leave the self in order to return to the self, right? To Say it in kind of like really basic terms. So, you know, La Harry ends up being this really interesting case, I think, for how we critics and readers, you know, what, what we think is identitarian, right. What we think was an ethnic text, what we think was a personal text, right. Like just to, just to say one more line about it, you know, Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian American. You know, short stories about Indian Americans. People always asked her, right. If they were autobiographical. And yet the most profoundly autobiographical stuff she's been doing is the stuff that she's doing in Italian, right, Which is this sort of like third space, other language that is neither her mother tongue nor the language in which she became, you know, a famous, a famous writer, you know, so what is personal? What is identitarian? What is the self? What is, you know, what does it mean to be an Indian writer? I think Lahiri's turn to Italian is a super fascinating case with which we can re. Ask all of those questions.
- [63:10]
Morteza Hajizadeh
You're right, yeah. I'm going to bring it all to an end with a final question. Your book is a beautiful mix of literary criticism, literary theory, and also reflections on politics and the role of public intellectual. Where the section that comes to say it also in the section you discuss, Spivak. We live in difficult times, as we alluded to. There's a rise of right wing populists, there's a rise of this kind of even sometimes white supremacist discourse. And there's a lot of anti minority, anti immigration. This goes all over the world and it's not only endemic to the United States. There's an attack on humanities, there's an attack on public intellectuals. And I think there was a conference three or four years ago, the National Conservative Conference, where J.D. vance, he wasn't the vice president back then, he said professor is the enemy and he was talking about all this kind of idea of liberal education, education. So in this day and age, the universities are, like I said, also under attack from within with the whole restructuring and neoliberalization of education. It's a very general question, but I'm keen to know your thoughts. As a word of advice, maybe for our listeners, what is the role of critical reading, literary theory, which is kind of critical theory as well, what is the role of literature in helping us navigate this difficult landscape without falling into the trap, trap of an identitarian politics either? So how can literature and literary theory provide a way forward to navigate this, this difficult landscape?
- [64:49]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Yeah, no, I think it's a great Question. It's a question we have to keep asking ourselves. I mean, maybe if I can start though with something you said, you said a little earlier, right. You mentioned JD Van saying the professor is the enemy. You know, I think, I think we take that very seriously. And I'm going to say this in a political way. Okay, so. And you know, sure, I'll speak in the U. S. Context. Okay. We are the enemy. We are the enemies of the state. We have been declared enemies of the state. I think that's very clarifying. I think that's very clarifying. And it's an opportunity and it's a lesson that many people in many other parts of the world have had to learn long before we did in the United States. And so it's about time that we learned from fellow academics, fellow scholars, fellow public intellectuals, fellow activists, fellow readers and writers around the world about what it means to have been declared enemies of the state in that way that Vance did, you know, even though he was not vice president yet. So I think it's clarifying and I think it's energizing. And I think we have to, it's an opportunity for us, as you said, to ask ourselves very seriously, you know, what is the value of what we do? But I don't think we do it in a kind of defensive or as I said earlier, kind of self flagellating way, because we have to define the terms, right. Of our own values. It's not going to be value according to some business speak, you know, ideas of return on investment, right? But, but we know what we have learned from as, as thinkers, as readers and writers, from the encounter of literature. And, you know, many parts of a lot of the cliches are, you know, they're part true, right? That part of what we learn is, you know, all the kind of the cliches are about, you know, the, you know, empathy and the inhabitants of other perspectives and all of this kind of stuff. And, you know, I take seriously criticisms like Namwali Serpell's of the banality of empathy and everything. But what about the experience of the text? What is writing? What is the relationship between writing and life? What about the text as an opportunity to encounter otherness and alterity, but not just the otherness or alterity of the text, but the otherness and the alterity of the self, right? What about literature as a portal to other worlds? Not just of, you know, racial, cultural, national difference, but, you know, to other time periods. What about language, right? As this uniquely, brilliantly, you know, human technology through which we might better understand. Actually the biggest question of all, you know, maybe what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be in relation? Right. That's also what literature teaches us is not. It's not always just, you know, a solid. You're never reading alone. You're always reading a text that has already been read. Even if you're the second reader, it's always the case that the writer was the first reader. Right. You're always in relation when you are with a text. And now more than ever, we have to think about interdependence and we have to think about community and how to fight for it and create it. I also think, and you know, and maybe I'm getting a bit hokey, but I think that's okay. Or, you know, a bit sentimental or saccharine. But you know, as, as people who believe in the value of the literature classroom. Right. This is the moment to also rethink not just, you know, what is the value of literature, but what is the value of the literature classroom. Right. Where we can come together to think about how, for example, the text sounds and resounds differently for each of us and yet provides us a new point of entry into a relationship of, of togetherness and provides an occasion for kind of critical communion. Right. Like I think we, this is our moment to, to think about literature, to theorize literature from the classroom to. And to. And to. And to not doubt ourselves. Those of us who went into this work and world because, you know, maybe it was intuition, maybe it was someone told us, maybe we were just lucky, but because we knew it was going to be a place where we could challenge ourselves and others and learn what it means to be, you know, one of many people in the world. So. So yeah, that's my advice is that we get energized and we allow this moment to be clarifying and we do the work that we know we need to do.
- [68:51]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Thank you very much for this wonderful conversation and this wonderful answer. I guess you've put it beautifully. If you've been declared the enemy of the state, it means you're doing the right thing. Really enjoyed this conversation and I strongly recommend this book to our, I think so over determined how Indian English literature becomes ethnic post colonial Anglophone. And I must say, before we come to the end of the intro, I must say when I saw the title of the book, I thought it's another post colonial critique or post colonial book, but it's not. I do strongly recommend to our listeners, I think I picked up that through our conversation. Picked it up that it's way, way more than that. There is some postcolonial literature in that. There's discussion of that. But it was quite refreshing, take, let's say, of postcolonial literature to me. And it was very much conversant with what's happening around the world. And I think that came out in our discussion several times. So I do strongly recommend this beautiful book that was published by Columbia University Press just a couple of months ago. Thank you very much, Ragini, for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network.
- [70:03]
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
Thank you.