What is We?

The concept “we” is central to every field in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, yet it has been overdetermined by the question of “who we are”, leaving its basic conceptual operations undertheorized.

In What is We? Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan argues that “we” is not a collective to belong to or be excluded from, nor is it a specific group to be identified. Rather, “we” functions as a method – one that organizes inclusion and exclusion, communion and isolation, coercion and liberation, division and incorporation, forgetting and remembering.

Across ten linked chapters, the book unfolds social, historical, political, grammatical, linguistic, literary, and personal responses to its titular question. By seeing “we” as a method for enacting, apprehending, contesting, and instrumentalizing boundaries, it invites us to confront the challenge of failure, embrace the possibility of impossibility, and acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.

Author Biography

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of a literary studies monograph, Overdetermined (2025), co-writer of an epistolary memoir, The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once (2025), and a co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023). Her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.