States of Disconnect studies crises of transnationalism in Chinese and Hindi texts (1900-1965) that express an aversion to pairing ideas of China and India together. Such texts may seem to spell the ends of comparative thought, but the book shows how literary practice can offer possibilities of relation in the face of insular nationalisms and against globalized habits of thought. The book offers “disconnect as a critical lens for making sense of severed, interrupted, or absent transnational connection, and for finding in such moments an ethics of relation.

ADHIRA MANGALGIRI is Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She is also currently an Associate at the Harvard University Asia Center. Besides publishing in internationally reputed academic journals, she serves as General Editor for Comparative Critical Studies, the house journal for the British Comparative Literature Association, the Managing Book Review Editor for Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Asian Interactions, and General Editor for the China-India Studies database. In 2015, she received the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA)
Horst Frenz Prize.

TANSEN SEN is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Professor at New York University (NYU). He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). He has done extensive research in India, China, Japan, and Singapore and was the founding head of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Center in Singapore.