What Is We? - Philosophy: The New Basics by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan

About the Book

An analysis of the concept "we" and the central role it plays in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences. Rather than as a collective to belong to or be excluded from, or as a specific group to be identified with, the book argues that "we" functions as a method.

Book Synopsis

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 Tharoor 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.

Review Quotes

Srinivasan has written an undeniably powerful book delineating the different roles each of us play - and responsibilities each of us have - in determining the social commitments that matter most to us and why. Whether negotiating the loss/care of loved ones or capturing some of the difficult decisions to be made during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, the arguments and stories she offers are personally moving and intellectually challenging.--John L. Jackson, Jr, author of Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity

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'.--Michael Schwarz, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Emory University

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

About the Author

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.