Affirmation and Disidentification

Abstract

Scholars have argued that from the late 1980s when India started following neoliberal policies, the newly emerging consumption practices have played a central role in restructuring the interrelated domains of erotics, pleasure, politics and national identification. In this article, I build on these studies by paying attention to the understudied problematic whereby branding and advertising practices of multinational corporations’ channel a collective nation through deploying conspicuously objectified bodies as figures enlisting consumer-identification. The popular and award-winning ad-film of Happydent White chewing gum titled Happydent White Palace (2007), which advertises the ‘teeth whitening’ quality of the product by visualizing a hyperbolic scenario of a mouth emitting light after using the chewing gum, is an exemplary case. The closing shot crystallizes the enlisting of identification via objectification: it shows a palace servant perched on a lamp post in the darkness of night, jutting his neck out and lighting up the world around him while insects fly around his face. The brand experience is here affirmed by highlighting precisely the most troubling questions of servile labour and poverty within the nation. The paper explores how this identificatory strategy, one that might be read in relation to disidentification, is also used to affirm brand experience. Using theorisations of branding, labour and nationalism, I argue that in the wake of neoliberalism in India, such an affirmation is possible by making manifest the virtual nation as superflat, a conscious ‘playful’, ‘flattened, self-mocking’ national aesthetic constructed for the commercial market.