A review of Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, Purnima Mankekar, Duke University Press, 2015.
It’s all in the title. UNSETTLING. INDIA. AFFECT. TEMPORALITY. TRANSNATIONALITY. The key concepts are all listed here, in a sequence that will be repeated over and over in the book, like a devotional mantra. It is, if you will, the anthropologist’s “Om mani padme hum”, the way she attains her own private nirvana. Purnima Mankekar’s objective, as she states repeatedly, is to examine “how India is constructed as well as unsettled as an archive of affect and temporality in contexts shaped by transnational public cultures and neoliberalism.” Each word in this mission statement opens a particular space for ordering the observations that she gathered in the course of her fieldwork in India and in California. Indeed, the chapters of the book hold together by a thread, and this common thread is provided by the words listed in the book’s title. So let me engage with them one by one, in no particular order of succession.
Diasporic subjects and transnational imaginaries
TRANSNATIONALITY refers, first, to the two sites where the author conducted fieldwork, gathered observations, and interacted with her informants. The ethnographic material of which the book is composed was collected through the course of nearly two decades in various locations clustered around New Delhi and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where many immigrants from the South Asian subcontinent have settled. Transnationalism has been defined in anthropology as “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement.” Mankekar complicates this definition by noting that diasporic subjects often cannot be pinned down to one place of origin or to one settlement location, as they frequently move across borders and develop modes of identification that are not tied to territory. In addition, transnational imaginaries also affect non-migrants who can only dream of settling abroad but for whom the distant foreign is brought close to home by television programs or consumer culture.
In a more restricted manner, transnationality applies to transnational public cultures as they are studied by the author: Bollywood movies, TV dramas, commodity consumption, ideologies of nationhood, discourses of morality, and fictive identities as in the call centers where young Indian operators impersonate the role of typical Americans. Mankekar treats transnational media as text to be subjected to textual analysis, but also as a practice to be experienced in tandem with her informants. She tells how she is able to break the ice with a busy IT executive by referring to a Bollywood drama, how she brings an Indonesia-born Sikh Indian-American to an old Raj Kapoor movie, or how she discusses gender roles and sexuality with lower-middle class and working-class informants in New Delhi based on TV serials and commercials. Public cultures are transnational because they address or interpellate a public wider than the national community; because they mobilize the forces of borderless capital and commodity fetishism; and because they often picture diasporic subjects while enabling men and women to acquire the capacity to imagine life in other places.
DDLJ, K3G, and B&B
The movies Mankekar discusses are known to many English-speaking audiences in India and abroad by their acronyms or abbreviated titles. “DDLJ” tells the story of young lovers straddling borders and communities to win parental approval to marry. “K3G” is about an adopted son expelled from his rich home for disobeying his father’s marriage injunction and then brought back into the family fold by his elder brother. Bunty and Babli is a road movie about two swindlers who escape from their small town by impersonating rich people’s identities. These stories resonate with the courting of nonresident Indians or NRIs by the Indian state appealing to their investments and skills (DDLJ); they espouse the ideology of Hindi nationalism by producing a fantasy of a reterritorialized Global India in which religious and other minorities are conspicuous by their absence (K3G); or they reflect the increased capacity to aspire of call center operators and other lower middle-class Indian who adopt new names and borrowed identities (B&B). Viewing these movies while reading the book in parallel provides the reader with a wonderful introduction to a fascinating cinematic genre.
AFFECT is a category that is mobilized on different counts. It is a dimension of ethnographic fieldwork, on par with cultural sensitivity and theoretical foregrounding. As Mankekar notes, “conducting ethnographic analysis is itself a deeply affective process and entails an engagement with the entire being of the ethnographer.” She situates her encounters with informants in their sensory and emotive contexts, providing notations on tastes, smells, likes and dislikes. “India shopping” in the ethnic grocery stores run by South Asians in the San Francisco Bay Area involves a whole range of affects, experienced by the author and her informants in intimate, embodied, and often visceral ways. They bring into play “senses of touch, smell, sound, sight, and taste.” These stores provide spaces where community members gather and exchange news about community events, and where new arrivals can learn about neighborhoods, schools, and employment opportunities. They are also places where the community exercises its surveillance upon its members and sanctions “loud” or deviant behavior. All is by no means positive in the outlook and values of Indian Americans, or in the political orientation of citizens back home. In particular, the author develops strongly negative affects towards people who espouse the Hindutva nationalist ideology and who wield campaigns of “aggressive national regeneration” aimed at religious minorities or, more prosaically, against Valentine Day celebrations. The ethnographer’s rapport with her informants is not always based on empathy and understanding.
The political economy of affects
Affect is also part of a political economy of affective labor, affective capital, and affect circulation. Michael Hardt has noted that whole sectors of the economy are “focused on the creation and manipulation of affects.” In particular, affect is constitutive of forms of labor central to the global capitalist economy, as in the transnational service sector where India claims a distinctive competitive advantage. Elaborating the notion further in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed conceives of affect as a form of capital. Analogous to the production of surplus value in capitalism, affects assume value cumulatively through circulation. Affective economies are composed of affective investment, affective value, affective circulation, and affective regimes of production and consumption. Affect is distinct from feeling (the domain of individual subjectivity) and emotion (the domain of the linguistic). Affects are generative of subjectivity—of action and agency, the capacity to act and be acted upon.
Mankekar uses these theoretical insights in a fine-grained ethnography of call center operators in a New Delhi suburb. Call centers have become the most visible part of the business outsourcing industry and have been heralded by media pundits and globalists as proof that “the world is (becoming) flat.” Mankekar demonstrates the value of ethnographic writing as opposed to media reporting. She describes affective labor as based on affective repertories – of courtesy, familiarity, friendliness, helpfulness, and, above all, caring. It is also based on the alienation of workers who refashion their only means of production—their own selves, their own bodies—through practices of impersonation and borrowed identities. As the two movie characters Bunty and Babli, call center agents become themselves by becoming others. Their aspirations to upward mobility, glamour, and success is also nurtured by transnational media: they are required to watch Hollywood films and episodes of US television shows such as Friends, and to use them as resources to acquire American accents, adopt American colloquialisms, and learn about the American way of life. They engage in virtual migration through IT-mediated work and cultivate lateral mobility by moving from one employer to the next. But the end of distance doesn’t bring the end of place. The virtual migration of call center agents coexists with forms of emplacement and immobility (and in some cases, virtual incarceration) through technologies of regulation and surveillance.
Nostalgy for the future
TEMPORALITY is the second repertory or archive mobilized, in conjunction with affect, to delineate the production and unsettling of transnational India. Describing the modern imagination as an expanded “capacity to aspire,” Arjun Appadurai suggested that we foreground aspiration in order to “place futurity, rather than pastness, at the heart of our thinking about culture.” Indian residents or diasporic subjects locate India not so much in the past as in the future. In this new regime of temporality, tradition emerges as an affective process that entails “not so much the invocation of a past as the generation of a set of practices enabling subjects to imagine and embrace specific forms of futurity.” Among diasporic Indians who carry India in their heart wherever they go, Indianness is not constructed as static or unchanging but instead is portable and flexible. Similarly, Hindu natinonalists experience “nostalgia for the future”: their longing for a glorified and mythic past combines with an aspiration to march toward a glowing future as moral subjects of Global India. In this sense, “time has agency or, at the very least, a force of its own.” Time combines with affect to shape subject formation and social process.
INDIA is constituted as an archive of affect and temporality by transnational public cultures. What “India” means is very different for each of her informants in New Delhi or in the San Francisco Bay area. Some subscribe to Hindu nationalist discourses of national purity, while others adhere to secularist conceptions of nationhood. Some insist on bounded territory and fixed identities, while others are engaged in transnational deterritorialization processes and multifaceted roles. Diaspora members carry India in their hearts wherever they go, while some individuals construct their own private India with disparate elements assembled through identity bricolage. Second-generation youth express their identity in terms of cultural difference: for these transnational consumers of Bollywood musicals and ethnic productions, “it’s cool to be Indian now”. Food is of particular significance to communities that travel across transnational space. As a mother testifies, “now that the kids are in school, they’re forgetting their Gujarati. But the least I can do is to give them one Indian meal a day.” Some see India as a country of origin, while others identify it as the land of the future.
Indian settlements and unsettlements
UNSETTLING is a common analytic that hints at the subversive nature of academic writing, politically and culturally. The disciplines of gender studies, media studies, critical theory, or cultural studies are particularly unsettling in the sense that they introduce ambiguity and uncertainty where the dominant ideology tries to impose certitude and conformity. Like many cultural critics committed to a progressive agenda, Mankekar does not take categories for granted. She refuses to essentialize notions of nation, gender, class, or ethnicity, while at the same time recognizing their relevance for interpreting social processes of identity formation and collective mobilization. In particular, she unpacks and decanters the totalizing claims of nationhood. She shows that “unsettlement is intrinsic to the production of India, such that Indian culture is conceptualized as chronically in flux, as always emergent.” India is unsettling as a nation: it challenges aspects of American identity, and is deemed particularly threatening to the self-representation of the US as a technological leader. Outsourcing service activities to India elicits reactions of rejection or even racist slurs, as when Americans realize they have been connected to a consumer service located in India. As the author notes, “we rarely see the same virulence in discussions about outsourcing to Israel and Ireland.”
Unsettling India is also part of a wider project of unsettling nations. India is not the only nation to be constituted and unsettled by regimes of affect and temporality. As Mankekar claims in her conclusion, “I have wished to sketch the contours of a conceptual and political framework that may enable us to unsettle the exclusionary and violent claims of the US nation.” In post-September 11 America, fear and rage against people of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin, in particular those “deemed to be Muslims” (such as Sikh men wearing a turban) contribute to the creation of a nation predicated on the marginalization and demonization of racial and cultural Others. This book is about unsettlement as an ethnographic strategy as well as an analytic. “It is vulnerable to the irruption of surprises, emergences, and potentialities, and to the ineffable, the inarticulate, and the inscrutable.” Traditional conceptions of family, gender, or Indianness are displaced and unsettled by images of sensuality and erotic longing. Even the most conventional romance stories or the most obtuse nationalist discourse carry a twist, a fault line that opens them to the dimension of desire. It is the hero’s respect for Indian women’s sexual purity that makes DDLJ a truly erotic movie. The controversies surrounding Valentine Day in India underscore the greater visibility of romantic love and displays of affection between young men and women. India is constructed and unsettled in the same move. Mankekar revels in revealing these shifts and cracks in the fabric of social life.
The Duke Reader 