In Mobile Republics: Postnational Itineraries of Authorship between India and the Caribbean, Assistant Professor of English Gautam Premnath aims to redirect how postcolonial literary criticism construes the author's relationship to state power. He focuses on the influential body of work produced by contemporary Indian writers working in English, highlighting their often tense relationship with received narratives of Indian nationalism, and showing how their positions and attitudes invoke ideologies of authorship generated in Indian diasporic writing. Focusing on one especially significant diasporic context, he shows how Indo-Trinidadian writers of the 1950s and 60s cultivate distinct forms of critical detachment from ascendant Caribbean nationalism, and traces how these eventually come to authorize a new postnationalist dispensation in Indian writing. At the core of the project is an account of how V.S. Naipaul's exilic mode of authorship is adopted and recirculated by Indian writers like Amitav Ghosh. But Premnath also discerns a "counternational" tendency in Trinidadian writers like Sam Selvon and Indians like Arundhati Roy, which has the potential to renew and reinvent national agendas in both India and the Caribbean.