Tarushi Sonthalia

Tarushi Sonthalia’s research focuses on the aesthetic and epistemic affordances of speculative fiction, with a particular emphasis on contemporary speculative fiction from the Caribbean and South Asia. She offers speculative fiction as a practice of “(un)worlding”: a practice of unsettling normative conceptions of reality via narrative world-building that pushes and breaks the bounds of this reality. Her current project, tentatively titled (Un)worlding Now: The Unsettling Imaginaries of Contemporary Speculative Fiction from the Global South, elaborates on (un)worlding’s framework and explores its implications for contemporary social and political thought.

More broadly, Sonthalia’s scholarly interests include global modernisms and 20th and 21st-century literatures from the Global South. Queer, feminist, and decolonial theories fundamentally animate her research and teaching, both of which are firmly interdisciplinary in nature. Her work is forthcoming in Signs.