“This beautifully written and deeply insightful book on anticolonial neologisms and ‘print internationalism’ gives light to the connection between language and revolution. Indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in the textual and literary stakes of postcolonial studies.” —Leela Gandhi, author of The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–1950

“Put aside misgivings about writing ‘in the language of the colonizer.’ In this astonishing book Madhumita Lahiri shows just how print internationalism, female agency, and the English language could be mobilized to write against Anglo-American hegemony at its apex. ’Imperfect’ though they may have been, Tagore, Gandhi and Du Bois challenged racism and the almighty dollar by inventing new cosmopolitan publics, linking South to South in ways we must learn from today.” —Haun Saussy, author of Are We Comparing Yet? and translator of Jean Métellus’s When the Pipirite Sings (Northwestern, 2019)

“One of the most valuable contributions of this volume is its attention to a broad array of archival sources—periodicals, speeches, multiple editions—that give a sense of the media specificity of print internationalism. But because the core texts and figures are so well known, Lahiri’s major contribution is not so much the ‘what’ of what we are reading, but the ‘how.’ Throughout the text, Lahiri calls on us to employ a more careful, perhaps more generous form of reading than the pursuit of political resolution and ‘normative tone’ she claims emerges from traditional postcolonial analyses. In contrast, she attempts to rehabilitate the ‘sociability of reading’ through which differently situated readers would have encountered each other in these textual spaces: reading ‘not with or against the grain, but from somewhere—or, ideally, from two places at once.’” —Roanne Kantor, Comparative Literature
 
“Lahiri’s reading practice is admirably dialectical while also noting the instrumental role that women played in the work of the three luminaries she examines: specifically, Jessie Redmon Fauset with Du Bois, Sister Nivedita (née Margaret Noble) with Tagore, and Sonja Schlesin with Gandhi.” —Bassam Sidiki, Pyriscence

“Lahiri’s concern with the past is but only to propose a comradeship for the present and the future. She is commendable with her research and her detailed depiction of minute instances in favour of her proposition.” —Ayan Chakraborty, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

“Imperfect Solidarities eschews a simple biography in favor of a critical exploration of the ways in which each figure anticipates the political and textual shifts that today preoccupy the discipline of literary studies broadly, and postcolonial studies more specifically . . . A wonderful addition to a utopian studies reading list. The book's emphasis of a print internationalism, merging the future-oriented approach of internationalism with the use of print media "to create alternate geographies" (4), establishes a community amongst three figures who are rarely read together. But unlike other postcolonial texts, Imperfect Solidarities crosses borders not simply as a means of cherry-picking examples but because the material to which it responds demands such crossing.” —Robert LaRue, Utopian Studies

“A careful and meticulously constructed book . . . Hill’s major achievement here is to reconcile comparative literature with transnational methodologies.” —Novel

“Lahiri highlights how activists from across the Anglophone world used print networks to connect with one another and foster new language against racial inequality.Lahiri does not simply present a biographical account of these thinkers and their interactions. Instead, in an innovative methodological approach, she examines the creation of three neologisms that impacted and informed global struggles for freedom and equality . . . Lahiri’s attention to the limitations of internationalist thinking and recognition of its pitfalls as much as its potential makes her book a particularly valuable intervention for people interested in reading and writing histories of internationalism.” —Itinerario