Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
An extraordinarily well-written book, What is We? offers a powerful genealogy of the many ways different understandings of 'we' shape our private, social, and political lives. It illuminates how specific meanings of 'we' function as tools of division and inclusion alike. Especially insightful is its conceptualization of the fascinating and often tension-laden relationship between 'I' and 'we'.
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