Race and Ethnicity in Post-network American Television

Abstract

This article examines post-network American television’s fraught relationship with race and ethnicity by exploring two recent media ventures focused on South Asian Americans: MTV-Desi and NBC’s Outsourced. Approaching these media ventures as productive failures, we examine how industry workers narrate these failures to trace how the contemporary television industry in the United States imagines racial and ethnic identities. Bringing together interviews with media industry professionals, observations at a media industry convention, and thematic analyses of trade press and news coverage, we argue that both media ventures are symptomatic of nationalist logics that inform the operations of television industry professionals even as they seek to target audiences increasingly embedded in transnational media circuits. Industry professionals’ misreading of South Asian Americans’ position in the racial economies of the United States and changes in patterns of media circulation reveal the challenges confronting the media industry when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity.