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 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, acknowledge the hallucinatory nature of the universal.