Recent essays:
- “Can Literary Theory be Participatory?” (post-45, 2019): link
“In an unfolding moment when digital platforms enable open-source participatory opportunities for remixing and redeploying “culture,” literary theory has remained obstinately analog—unwilling to engage with current practices of production and consumption.”
- “The Novel as Commodity” (Cambridge, 2018): pdf
“To study the novel as a commodity includes studying its circulation in material and symbolic realms as an object that trades both in commercial and in cultural capital.”
- “Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India” (Cambridge, 2015): pdf
“A curious thing happened to the Indian novel in English on the way to the twenty-first century. It stopped being a child of midnight. It even stopped being a child.”
- “Genre Fiction in India” (Oxford, 2019): pdf
“In general, the story of genre fiction situates the Anglo American world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as its locus classicus. Applying this history to India obscures what is unusual about Indian publishing and the very recent— C21— proliferation of genre fiction on the subcontinent.”
- “Globalizing Victorian Studies” (Yearbook of English Studies, 2011): pdf
“Might ‘Victorian’ be a term whose real use lies in indexing a set of preoccupations rather than confining those preoccupations to history and geography?”
Books:
Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy
(Columbia UP, 2015; ISBN: 978-0231169615)
—Read the introduction,”Bollywood’s India,” here
In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India
(Columbia UP, 2002; Oxford UP, 2003; ISBN: 978-0231125857)
—Read the introduction, “The Poetical Economy of Consumption,” here
The 1970s and its Legacies in India’s Cinemas
(co-edited; Routledge 2014; ISBN: 978-0415836586)