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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.
In a time of deep divisiveness, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan offers an elegant and compelling meditation on an idea more essential than ever, the very notion of a collective we. Rather than taking its value as a given, Srinivasan pursues its promise as a matter of critical method, exploring what communion may yet become in radical and transformative terms.
— Anand Pandian, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
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.
Introduction: “We” is a method
1. Of inclusion
2. Of exclusion
3. Of communion
4. Of isolation
5. Of coercion
6. Of liberation
7. Of division
8. Of incorporation
9. Of forgetting
10. Of remembering