I’m an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Michigan, with an additional affiliation in the Department of Film, Television, and Media.
I study the stories that large, multiethnic democracies – like India, South Africa, and the United States – tell themselves about identity, community, and what counts as appropriate politics. In my first book,Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Forging of the Global Anglophone, published by Northwestern University Press in 2020, I analyzed the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, M.K. Gandhi, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Tagore, who lived in Bengal, wrote extensively about China and Japan; Gandhi, famously Indian, lived and wrote about the problems of South Africa; and Du Bois, the iconic African American intellectual, consistently wrote about India for his Black American readership. I argued that these famous intellectuals were practicing what I called print internationalism: coining new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).
I’m currently writing a book titled “How We Hate Now: Xenophobia in the Age of Antiracism.” In an increasingly bordered and deglobalizing world, immigrants are widely perceived in negative terms, not only in the rhetoric of explicitly anti-immigrant politicians but also, as I demonstrate, in the increasingly closed imaginaries of much contemporary fiction.
I welcome both the Bengali (মধুমিতা লাহিড়ী) and the Hindi (मधुमिता लाहिड़ी) pronunciations of my name. You can listen to an audio recording of the latter here.
