Department of English

I specialize in the conjunction of US Empire Studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, ethnic studies, and transnational Asian American Studies.  I have focused in the past on the nineteenth century but in the last twenty years I have turned to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am interested in the centrality of imperialism and colonialism to US literature and culture and the potential of postcolonial theory in the study of contemporary US literature. However, I do not believe in a one size fits all theoretical perspective and am always interested in how local conditions impact these perspectives.  I like theory from the ground up.  I am also interested in liberation pedagogy, particularly through postcolonial studies and critical race theory.

MY RESEARCH TRAJECTORY

My work in US Empire studies started with my second book, US Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 (1998) in which I demonstrated the centrality of the “Orient” (note the plural in Orientalisms)  as a site of literary, political, and cultural intervention as well as nation building to writers such as Melville, Poe, Emerson, and Maria Susanna Cummins. In my next book, Locating Race: Global Sites of PostColonial Citizenship (2009) I argued for a race and place-based understanding of how different racial groups are specifically constructed by the nation-state and imperial relations. I showed how the writings of Black Nationalists,  Native American activists, and groups like Partido Nacional La Raza Unida offered an imagined identity of post-colonial citizenship based on cultural identity and  local activism.

My latest book, Campaigns of Knowledge: US Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (2019) contended that the creation of a suitable pedagogical subject through education reform was a major strategy of U.S. colonialism and imperialism, a biopolitical technology of management. Filipinos and Japanese were contrasting objects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos were undercivilized little brown brothers to be uplifted; the Japanese were overcivilized and had to be decivilized and re-educated. The book engaged with an archive of state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, school textbooks, as well as cultural productions of the colonized subjects, the latter demonstrating how these subjects seized and rearticulated colonial pedagogy for their own ends.

I have also directed a documentary, In His Own Home, about the police shooting of an African student on the UF campus. You can watch it on amazon.

MY CURRENT RESEARCH

I am currently finishing my book, Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading which conjoins my interest in Ethnic Studies, critical race studies, pedagogy and Affect Studies in order to interrogate and complicate prevailing paradigms of short stories and novels through sympathy and identification. I show that the contemporary policing of the teaching of race is fueled by a fear of racial solidarity and offer a practice of critical race reading and activism that challenges students to awaken to questions of racial privilege and hierarchy not through comfortable racial identification but through racial reckoning similar to supporters of Black Lives Matter and members of Jewish Voice for Peace. I illustrate this reading through analyses of works by Toni Morrison, Julie Otsuka, Susan Abulhawa, Patrice Khan-Cullors, and J.M. Coetzee. Teaching Solidarity will be published by the University of California press as part of their American Studies Now series in April 2026.

MY TEACHING

I teach upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses on postcolonial theory, Asian American studies, Refugee studies, US empire studies and Comparative settler colonialisms.  You can find some of my sample syllabi here: Introduction to Postcolonial Theory; Refugees, Illegals, Immigrants and Other Impossible Subjects of Asian America; Global Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and Contemporary Literature; Cultures of US Imperialism.

I am the undergraduate advisor for the minor in Asian American Studies and faculty advisor for several student organizations including Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Sparks Magazine, and the India Student Association.

MORE ABOUT ME

I am from India and received my M.A. in English from Panjab University and my Ph.D. from Purdue University (1986).  I have published several edited collections including Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies and Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism.  I have also published articles in journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, SIGNS, Interventions, and Cultural Critique as well as given invited talks at national and international universities.

Fun Facts: I love playing tennis, biking, and walking.

For further details please see my CV.