Tilt : A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma

Tilt is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us, and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts.

Part critical international relations theory, part radical pedagogy, part academic feminist novel, Tilt follows a fictionalized Indian-American professor, Kavya, as she grapples with family violence and estrangement that she traces to her grandparents’ experiences during colonialism. Inspired by bell hooks’ view of teaching as politically transformative, Kavya crafts lesson plans to think through the suffering that she and so many others experience as a result of being descended from communities who endured systematic violence. She analyzes intergenerational trauma as a framework for how the wounds of oppressive political orders and hierarchies are “stored” in contemporary geopolitics, thereby keeping such oppression alive. When Kavya discovers her family’s infliction of caste harm and how global practitioners have coopted “intergenerational trauma” to diagnose and “fix” marginalized communities, she turns to a tool of these very communities, “futurist worldbuilding” through speculative imagination, art, and play, to radically confront both familial/kinship destruction and systems of oppression.