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

The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox Television, 1989-) humored audiences for decades through racial, comedic understandings of their memorable characters. Shilpa Davé addresses the famed “Thank you, come again!” Kwik-E-Mart Apu character and provides a longer trajectory for listening to and viewing these stereotypic characters. She builds on rich academic contributions of blackface and minstrelsy and shifts the lens toward brown, specifically Indian American communities. Davé’s innovative book in media studies complicates a representational analysis of race on television and film in the United States. Her analysis of performed accents within the genre of comedy prompts scholars of media representations to recognize accents as vocal markers of race and national origin. In Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, Davé employs a double meaning of the word “accent,” as both a relative tonal difference in someone’s speech and a minor décor that highlights a dominant piece. Analytically, her use of accent helps scholars understand the mediated construction of “otherness” through both sound and sight. Throughout six chapters, Davé reminds the reader of the hierarchies of vocal accents and how the imagined “American” accent—arguably heard as white Anglo-Saxon and middle class—establishes a national community; in turn, ethnic accents are excluded from the American Dream.

For racially ambiguous groups in the United States, like South Asians and Latinos, Davé argues that accent and performance racialize these communities regardless of citizenship status or generation. In her analysis of Indian accents she distinguishes between two concepts, brownface and brown voice. Performing in visual brownface, clothes, and makeup to look Indian, “allows for the ability to create a hybrid character that has some privileges but also retains cultural differences” (12). Because the performance of brownface is outside Black and white racial binaries, it implies a hybrid element of difference and racial privilege slightly different than the “exotic” other. Brown voice, the performance of a vocal Indian accent, is not as recognizable, Davé argues, hence overseen and underestimated in its significance. Ultimately, readers see how the evolution of accents on screen can serve as markers of assimilation, neo-Orientalism, foreignness, and sites of negotiation.

Davé locates her analysis with the origins of brownface and brown voice in the portrayals of South Asians in U.S. film. In the case study of The Party (dir. Blake Edwards, 1968) she argues that the ethnic performances were re-creations of Orientalist roles. The comedic portrayals of South Asians by non-South Asians were meant to lessen the threat of Asian immigration. The performances of brown voice and brownface have not disappeared, they have evolved with time and changed with shifts in media formats. Her analysis of two animated characters on television remarkably unveils how the performance of brown voice represents cultural privileges of assimilation and the status of Indian masculinity in relation to U.S. citizenship. Because animation depends on fictional drawings, an animated body, her focus on animation relies on the forefront of the voice of the character. Detached from an actual body, the voice escapes physical discrimination yet sonically can be attached to other drawn objects all in the name of comedy.

The two television case studies argued in detail in Indian Accents are The Simpsons’ Apu, an adult male convenience store owner, and, from the shortlived MTV animated series Clone High’s (2002–3), Gandhi, a teenage version of the nonviolent freedom fighter of India. She argues that Apu’s accented voice, foreign yet understandable in English, offers an inheritance of British coloniality. The familiarity and manufactured sound in the genre of comedy encourage laughter and mimicry all in the name of humor. As a genre, comedy lends itself to vocal imitation and hence the performance of brown voice. For the other animated series under investigation, the...