Abstract
Changing U.S. racial demographics have scholars of race and ethnicity questioning how population shifts will affect everyday social interactions and relations between racial groups and social institutions. Bhoomi K. Thakore’s South Asians on the U.S. Screen: Just Like Everyone Else? provides insight into how an increasing U.S. population of South Asians is changing the kinds of characters common in U.S. media and also influencing how audiences perceive South Asians.
Thakore aims to highlight (1) how South Asians’ assimilation trends influence how others perceive them, (2) how South Asians fit into the racialized and colorized social system in the United States, (3) how stereotypes of South Asians inform media representations and social perceptions, and (4) how demographics of South Asians have changed in the twenty-first century.
Thakore summarizes nonwhites’ representations in popular print, radio, film, and television (chapter 1), to embed the present wave of South Asian characters into historical context. She interweaves literature on immigration, critical media studies, audience studies, and race and ethnicity with the on-screen lives of familiar South Asian characters: Frieda Pinto/Latika and Dev Patel/Jamal from Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Apu from The Simpsons, Kal Penn/Kumar from the Harold and Kumar films, Mindy Kaling/Kelly from The Office, and Aziz Ansari/Tom from Parks and Recreation, among others (detailed in chapter 2). The time frame for data collection fell just shy of Kaling’s The Mindy Project (which began in 2012), which stars a South Asian female lead, though Thakore devotes the preface to unpacking the role and considering the effect of digital distribution on the visibility of South Asian characters.
Performing an audience study, Thakore is most concerned with the reactions and interpretations of viewers, whose observations are gleaned through mostly open-ended questions from 155 online surveys and 50 in-depth interviews. The discussion emanating from respondents is vivid and forthcoming as to why they like or dislike programs, how characters compare with South Asians they encounter in real life, and whether they view characters as positive, negative, or somewhere in between. (The latter category helps evade a hotly contested either/or dichotomy between the politics of respectability or embarrassment.)
Respondents’ perceptions of characters follow a historical trajectory of South Asian characters in U.S. media that ranges from the classic forever foreigner, to the assimilated model minority, and ends with the average American (chapter 3). These characters reflect immigration trends, from the immigration of South Asian professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields that gave rise to model minority stereotypes to their 1.5th- and 2nd-generation children’s middle-class upbringing and higher education in white social worlds that birthed Americanized depictions.
A chapter on ethnicity, gender, and national identity reveals, among other highlights, different standards for South Asian men and women (chapter 4). Men find work in roles that are asexual and nerdy, whereas women are held to westernized ideals of beauty and body types.
The final empirical chapter tackles the pioneering efforts and pitfalls of NBC’s Outsourced (2010–2011), set in a Mumbai call center and the sole program in the study with a sizable number of South Asian characters (chapter 5). Interestingly, many respondents felt immediately compelled to reject the program’s stereotypical premise; some dismissed the program before (or moments after) only viewing a trailer. In contrast, those who watched the program felt that the characters, and the show overall, became more well rounded and nuanced over the course of the season. The show and its reception raise debates about the unintended consequences of political correctness around contemporary racial discourses. Any character who remotely resembles a negative stereotype is outright condemned, which leaves little room to navigate for writers, directors, and producers who desire to refashion, bring new meanings to, or explore the depth of reality behind what appears to be a hackneyed type. Meanwhile, the promotion of purportedly less offensive “positive” stereotypes fosters an ideology of colorblindness that can have damaging effects, by obscuring racialized experiences and ignoring multiculturalism, racial inequality, and poverty.
South Asians’ marginalization, primarily playing secondary characters alongside white leads, resembles the predicament of other actors from U.S. racial minority groups. The preponderance of modern portrayals are products of ethnic characterizations, which Thakore defines as “the process by which non-white characters in TV and film are created as a result of the assimilationist stereotypes possessed by media producers, who in turn reproduce their stereotypes on screen” (p. 114). For the most part, South Asians are whitewashed or foreign in media and also in public perception. She writes, “The most assimilated of these characters were read by respondents as just like everyone else, thus perpetuating the notion that white values and white identity are the normative culture in the United States” (p. 48). With immigration appears to come an erasure of ethnic identity and culture, which has implications for popular culture images and audience reception. Accordingly, 1.5th- and 2nd-generation South Asian American respondents identified with U.S. images over Bollywood and South Asian media, which points to debates on immigrant incorporation and the lived experiences of new generations that cut across racial and ethnic groups.
Written in accessible prose, South Asians on the U.S. Screen is an engaging and informative text that joins a large body of critical race and media scholarship on film and television, which monitors the on-screen portrayals of different racial groups and evaluates how audiences make sense of those images. Updating earlier work on Asian portrayals, it provides an analysis of contemporary South Asian images and draws meaningful comparisons with other racial groups. The book would particularly interest television aficionados, as well as citizens concerned with the broader impact of immigration on facets of everyday life, including the production and reception of popular film and television images.