Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film by Shilpa S. Davé (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film by Shilpa S. Davé Sara Humphreys Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film. By Shilpa S. Davé. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013. In The Company We Keep (1989), Wayne Booth narrates a poignant anecdote that provides insight into the importance of Shilpa Davé’s Indian Accents: at a meeting to decide which texts to include for the upcoming academic year, Dr. Paul Moses, an African-American professor, stated that he could not teach Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) because of Twain’s minstrel representation of black masculinity. His colleagues, including Booth, were outraged—could he not see the importance of Huckleberry Finn as an example of good American literature? However, the academic value of the book was not so much of a concern to Dr. Moses as the book’s cultural work. Davé clearly has a similar goal in Indian Accents. She is concerned about the ways in which the formulaic modes of South Asian masculinity in popular American culture affects readers/viewers, and, as a result, she provides a perceptive reading of who gets to be called fully “American” and who does not. By providing cultural readings of what are, quite frankly, beloved characters that are embedded in American culture, Davé explains that these venerable characters, such as Apu in The Simpsons, narrate a monological version of South Asian masculine identity. She also clearly shows through a wide-ranging list of examples, from Peter Sellers’ turn as Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968) to Mike Myers’ portrayal of Guru Maurice Pitka in The Love Guru (2008) that the visual markers of race are harnessed to linguistic performance. Unfortunately, except for the excellent chapter on Apu, most of the book is under-theorized. While Davé claims to be analyzing accents, she does not use the tools of sociolinguistics as effectively as she needs to in order to develop her arguments fully. Further, she engages very few, if any, of the major theorists one might expect to see, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Teun van Dijk, and Norman Fairclough. It’s not simply the lack of a clear theoretical framework that hampers the book, but there is little in the way of linguistic analysis of a character’s actual language, such as her analysis of the John Wayne accent Apu affects in the episode “Much Apu About Nothing.” What lexis does Apu use? How are the words emphasized? How does the accent linguistically affect the relationships between characters in the scene? Why not provide more discussion of his accent particularly in post-9/11 episodes, in which his character undergoes certain linguistic changes? In sum, this book offers a much needed corrective to the portrayal of South Asian masculinity in American popular [End Page 181] culture and is, therefore, a valuable addition to the field. However, the book’s claims to supply a sociolinguistic analysis of these characters is overblown. This is a book that offers limited linguistic analysis of “Indian accents”; a great deal of valuable cultural analysis of “Indian accents”; and important explanations of the social and historical contexts of “Indian accents” in the U.S. Sara Humphreys Trent University, Canada Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association