Chandrashekhar’s first book project, Unpleasant Feelings: South Asian Minoritarianisms in the Contemporary Global Novel (in progress), revitalizes the intersections between postcolonial studies, affect studies, genre studies, and gender and sexuality studies to reimagine agitation, envy, vengeance, exhaustion, melancholia, mourning, and pessimism in the context of neoliberal capitalism, liberal humanitarianism, majoritarian nationalisms, and unsustainable developmentalism in South Asia and its diasporas in Canada, England, and the United States. Unpleasant 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 unpleasantness and locate it in the domain of the ordinary to reveal the continuum between everyday and extraordinary violence.

Shwetha’s research has been supported by: 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.