Review

Chandrashekhar, Shwetha. 2025. “Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone.” By Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Columbia University Press, 2025, 336 pp. Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 17.1 (2025): 88–91.

Refereed Journal Article

While scholars have paid attention to the workings of neoliberal fantasies and misogynistic views in Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men (2010), Joseph’s employment of unpleasant feelings has largely remained unexplored. This article examines the novel’s engagement with unpleasant feelings such as agitation, envy, and vengeance to highlight the tripartite connections between neoliberalism, casteism, and heteropatriarchy in present-day India. Drawing insights from postcolonial studies, affect studies, and critical caste studies, it demonstrates that in Serious Men, public and institutional spaces engender socially marginalized and emotionally wounded subjects by shaping their unpleasant feelings. Specifically, the article builds on and extends Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and works with the concept of the spatiality of unpleasant feelings to chart Joseph’s depictions of neoliberal spaces and their affects, the deep-rooted feelings and psychological compulsions of his characters, and the ordinary violence of casteism and heteropatriarchy that is normalized in India. Subsequently, it argues that by employing the unpleasant feelings of the Dalit protagonist and the only woman scientist in the novel, Joseph underlines the intersections between caste hierarchies and gender hierarchies and invites us to think about the gap between unpleasant feelings that are reasonable and the unjust actions these feelings lead to.

Refereed Journal Article

This article demonstrates how Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) conceptualizes debilitation as an affective post-disaster condition. The novel does this by foregrounding Animal’s unpleasant feelings, involuntary bodily responses, and unruly sexual urges. Building on Jasbir K. Puar’s conception of debilitation, I argue that Sinha not only obfuscates the ability-disability binary but also highlights the porosity between concepts such as the human, animal, and subhuman by depicting debilitation as a consequence of invisibilized forms of violence and injustice that are stretched across vast swathes of time and space. In illustrating the complex affective dynamics between Animal and other characters, the novel portrays disidentification as a response of marginalized and minoritarian subjects to the debilitation engendered by neoliberal capitalism, thereby offering readers a new way of grasping the intersections between disability, masculinity, and sexuality. Further, I suggest that Sinha captures the persistence of debilitation in Khaufpur, the fictional city in which the novel is set, through the ever-present and recurrent possibility of apocalypse. Against that persistence, Animal’s People balances the possibility of subaltern solidarity. The novel thereby calls for a more nuanced understanding of debilitation in the twenty-first-century Global South.

Review

Chandrashekhar Shwetha. 2024. “Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad: By Hil Malatino, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2022, 240 pp.” Critical Inquiry. 51.1 (2024): 217-18.

Review

Chandrashekhar, Shwetha. 2024. “Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh: By Elora Halim Chowdhury, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2022, 225 pp.” South Asian Review 45.3 (2023): 388–90.

Review

Chandrashekhar, Shwetha. 2023. “Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India: By Akshya Saxena, Princeton University Press, 2022, 206 pp.” South Asian History and Culture 14.3 (2023): 373–75.

Review

Chandrashekhar, Shwetha. 2023. “Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India: By Stacey Balkan, West Virginia University Press, 2022, 208 pp.” South Asian Review 44.1 (2023): 64–67.