"Irresistible Empire" primarily investigates how recent narratives from South Asia represent and re- imagine the political, cultural and economic consequences of global modernity in the global south. I chart the transnational circulation of a globalized "subcontinental aesthetic" (if such a category could be posited), as it travels, takes root, and re-circulates in postcolonial popular culture and fiction produced in the context of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri construe to be an epoch of postmodern "Empire", whose presiding sovereignty is acephalous, and whose form of domination is not conquest, but self-perpetuation and self-legitimization through, more than anything else, the astute maneuvering of language.