Book Series
ACCENTED: a fully open-access book series from Amherst College Press
Series editors: Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar
Accented publishes works exploring accent as a critical mode of cultural production and interpretation. The series seeks to model accented thinking as a way to disturb the normative logics of academic, archival, media, legal, and bureaucratic structures. Books in the series amplify subversive everyday acts by accented subjects and employ accent as an intersectional, intermedial, and interdisciplinary way of knowing. We invite rigorous, innovative, and daring scholarship (between 40,000 and 70,000 words) that spans textual, archival, ethnographic, and hybrid approaches across time periods and linguistic contexts. The series particularly welcomes projects that embrace the multimodal format, such as video essay books and dialogical experiments.
Edited Special Issues
"The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media," co-edited with Christopher T. Fan, Paul Nadal, and Tina Chen, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 11.2 (2025)
"1990 at 30," co-edited with J. Daniel Elam, Post45/Contemporaries (2020)
"From Postcolonial to World Anglophone: South Asia as Test Case," Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20.3 (2018)
"Fictions of the Pandemic," Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies (in preparation)
Journal Articles
"'English Like Hindi': Chetan Bhagat, Popular Fiction, and India's Voice," Comparative Literature 76.1 (2024)
"Reading Interculturalism After Kalamandalam," Post45: Peer Reviewed (2022)
"The Anglophone and the Anthropocene: Postcolonial in the Present Tense" MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 83.2 (2022)
"Do You Have to Have a Home to Leave?" South Asian Review 42.2. (2021)
"'Can the Subaltern Speak' to my Students?" Feminist Formations 32.1 (2020)
"Call Center Agents and Expatriate Writers: Twin Subjects of New Indian Capital," ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 49.4 (2018)
"Moderating Revolution: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, Toussaint Louverture, and the Civility of Reform," The Comparatist 41 (2017)
"Everyday stories: The people's archive and the rural in 'new' India," Studies in South Asian Film & Media 7:1+2 (2016)
"The Smithsonian Beside Itself: Exhibiting Indian Americans in the Era of New India," Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.2 (2015)
"The Rhetoric of Return: Diasporic Homecoming and the New Indian City," Room One Thousand 3 (2015)
Book Chapters
"Memoir, Autofiction, and the New Indian Humanities," The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, eds. Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar. Oxford University Press (2023)
"Is there a Call Center Literature?" Thinking with an Accent, eds. Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar. University of California Press (2023)
"Teaching South Asian Women's Writing to South Asian Students," Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women's Writing, eds. Deepika Bahri and Filippo Menozzi. MLA Options for Teaching (2021)
"South Asia," Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures, eds. Stefan Helgesson, Birgit Neumann, and Gabriele Rippl. De Gruyter (2020)
"'It's all very suggestive, but it isn't scholarship'," The Critic as Amateur, eds. Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde. Bloomsbury Academic (2019)
"Global India in 21st-Century Asian American Literature," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Oxford University Press, (2018)
"Unmoored: Passing, Slumming, and Return-Writing in New India," Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature, eds. Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-Wazedi. Routledge (2016)
Reviews and Review Essays
On Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English (Critical Inquiry); J. Daniel Elam’s World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Comparative Literature); Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan’s Good Innings (Public Books); Homi Bhabha's 'DissemiNation' (post45: Contemporaries); Pooja Rangan’s Immediations (Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry); Amit Chaudhuri’s Literary Activism (b2online); Angela Garbes’s Like a Mother (Public Books); Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents (Comparative Literature Studies); Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day (Public Books); Ian Almond’s The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri (SCTIW Review); Pheng Cheah’s What is a World? (Qui Parle); Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri (New Yorker); Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmpolitans (Public Books); Anand Pandian and MP Mariappan’s Ayya’s Accounts (American Book Review); Raj Kamal Jha’s She Will Build Him a City (post45: Contemporaries); Leslee Udwin’s India’s Daughter (Los Angeles Review of Books); The People’s Archive of Rural India (Public Books); Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon (The Margins/AAWW); Rana Dasgupta’s Capital (Public Books); Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (Public Books); Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (Women & Performance); Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Public Books)
Journalism and Occasional Essays
“It’s a Good Time to be an English Professor,” Inside Higher Ed (2025)
“Why AI Could Not Have Written Overdetermined,” CUP Blog (2025)
“The Pandemic Was a Portal,” The Philosopher (2025)
"Three Vasectomies, or, What is an Abortion Story?" post45: Contemporaries (2023)
"Possible Impossibles between Area and Queer," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2019)
"Rogue Hanuman on the Metro: Revisiting the Festival of India (1985-1986)," TIDES: Magazine of the South Asian American Digital Archive (2019)
"Is Laughter Yoga Really From India?" Zócalo Public Square (2019)
"The Lasting Trauma of Mothers Separated from their Nursing Children," The New Yorker (2018)
"The Slow Strangulation of a South Asian Magazine," The New Yorker (2016)
"Bobby Jindal and the Hyphenated American," Guernica (2015)
"Whose Currents?" Himal Southasian (2014)
"True Stories," The Caravan (2014)
Creative Nonfiction and Poetry
"Minor Planet 2986," Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (2020)
"Ricky and Jim and Me: On Whiteness," Politics/Letters (2019)
"Let's talk more about the lockdown," Popula (2019)
"Metal Boys," March Shredness (2017)
"God on Display (2005)" and "Man on Display (2005)," Kartika Review (2017)
I wrote a regular monthly column for India Currents magazine from 2001-2016. Most of those essays are archived here though not necessarily in the order of publication. I wrote about all sorts of things, from diasporic language loss and distance to high school suicides and my daughter’s 2014 medical crisis and Boney M in a Chennai dance club.
Feel free to email me for clean copies of specific essays, or for the editorial columns I wrote between 2007-2009.