Chandrashekhar’s first book project, Minoritarian Feelings: South Asian Unpleasantness in the Contemporary Global Novel (in progress), revitalizes the intersections between postcolonial studies, affect studies, novel studies, and gender and sexuality studies to reimagine agitation, envy, vengeance, exhaustion, melancholia, mourning, and pessimism in the context of partitions, liberal humanitarianism, majoritarian nationalisms, and unsustainable developmentalism in South Asia and its diasporas in Canada, England, and the United States. Minoritarian Feelings features close readings of works by Tahmima Anam, Gemini Wahhaj, Mirza Waheed, Anuk Arudpragasam, Indra Sinha, Mohammed Hanif, Jamil Jan Kochai, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Arundhati Roy. Chandrashekhar puts forth unpleasantness as a dynamic politico-affective concept and argues that contemporary global novels on South Asian pasts and presents mobilize the ambiguities and contingencies of negative feelings and locate them in the domain of the ordinary to reveal the continuum between everyday and extraordinary violence.

Shwetha’s research has been supported by: University of South Dakota’s College of Arts & Sciences and UMass’ World Studies Interdisciplinary Project-Decolonial Global Studies Mellon Summer Dissertation Fellowship, Research Enhancement and Leadership Fellowship, College of Humanities and Fine Arts Summer Dissertation Fellowship, Interdisciplinary Studies Institute Fellowship.