PAMLA 2025, San Francisco, California.

My first book project, Comparative Unpleasantness: Minoritarianism South Asian Affects and Novelistic Collectivities, contends that in order to grasp the promises and failures of postcolonial nationalism and neocolonial globalization in the context of South Asia, we must study how negative emotions and their manifestations shape and fracture cultural practices, political formations, and social milieus. Expanding this premise, the monograph examines the workings of agitation, envy, vengeance, melancholia, mourning, debilitation, exhaustion, apathy, and hope in twenty-first-century literary depictions of the gendered and multigenerational legacies of the 1947 and 1971 Partitions, civil wars and other long-drawn-out geopolitical conflicts, environmental catastrophes and industrial disasters, refugeehood, and queerphobia and transphobia in postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas. By “unpleasantness,” I refer to a constellation of physiological, psychological, and emotional responses of a range of minoritized subjects who experience, bear witness to, and at times participate in complex cycles of violence. I bridge the gap between what Sianne Ngai calls “situations of passivity” and postcolonial eruptions to argue that novels such as Uzma Aslam Khan’s Tresspassing (2003), Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011), Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (2018), Jamil Jan Kochai’s 99 Nights in Logar (2019) and Gemini Wahhaj’s The Children of this Madness (2023) mobilize the ambiguities and contingencies of unpleasantness to reveal the continuum between everyday and extraordinary violence.

My research has been supported by: University of South Dakota’s College of Arts & Sciences, and UMass Amherst’s 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, and Interdisciplinary Studies Institute Fellowship.