What Is We? - (Philosophy: The New Basics) by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan (Paperback)

About the Book

An analysis of the concept "we" and the central role it plays in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. Rather than as a collective to belong to or be excluded from, or as a specific group to be identified with, the book argues that "we" functions as a method.

Book Synopsis

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 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.

Review Quotes

An extraordinarily well-written book. It presents a powerful genealogy of so many ways in which different understandings of 'we' are at work in our private, social, and political lives, and of how specific meanings of 'we' are employed as methods of division, inclusion, etc. Its conceptualization of the fascinating and tension-laden relationship between I and we is especially insightful.--Michael Schwarz, Emory University

About the Author

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. She is an affiliate faculty member of Rice's department in Transnational Asian Studies and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.