Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Become Global by A. Aneesh (review)

Transnational call centers situated in India have, over the last decade, become powerful signifiers of the variegated social, cultural, economic, and political ramifications of the space–time compression (Harvey 1990) that characterizes globalization. In an original contribution to studies on globalization and work, A. Aneesh produces a rigorous and theoretically compelling account of Indian call centers as both locations and signifiers of a transnationally connected world. This is also one of the first accounts to produce rich descriptions through participant observation by way of the author’s employment in a call center. Over five tightly argued chapters, Neutral Accent problematizes the seeming homogenization or neutrality that globalization seems to want to inspire, even as he re-examines and dislocates the question of mimesis that is frequently emphasized in other accounts of call centers (Mirchandani 2012, Nadeem 2011). Arguing for such neutrality to be the “key to comprehending globalization” (3), Aneesh formulates a thesis on globalization as a set of “new differentiations” (4) that ought to be carefully theorized. Neutrality, in his account, is the belabored and learned indifference to recalcitrant differences that emerge through the various crises, breakdowns, and fault lines that he carefully chronicles.

Chapter 1 locates this ethnography within the landscape and history of Gurgaon, India. Taking readers through the dynamics of what forms the “nonplace” (14) of globalizing landscapes, the chapter argues for understanding how globalization demands places devoid of memory and origins. Through an evocative description of Gurgaon’s transformation from a “sunstruck expanse of fertile earth” (13) to “a set of transnational enclaves” (21), Aneesh tracks the failures of modernity and the dissipation of its promises into “private realizations of mini utopias” (21) far removed from the adjacent and constitutive environs of poverty, lack, and governmental apathy. Neutral Accent astutely locates the development of this collection of mini cities within an older phenomenon of export processing zones, developed as part of the “globalization of the nation-state” (26). Within such a plan, Gurgaon is re-signified as an intentionally designed global city, thereby reducing it to a set of “functionally packaged spaces of consumption, work, and living” (25). Aneesh argues that this necessitated the erasure of Gurgaon’s origins and history, since the plan needed to be executed as if sui generis. The failures and gaps in this plan notwithstanding, this analysis of Gurgaon exposes globalization as a functional set of attributes distributed haphazardly across the globe through the construction of nonplaces.

Chapter 2 focuses on the spatial specificity, as opposed to the corporate universality of the the call center’s interiors. It also pays heed to the temporal dissonance produced by the call center in its creation of a nightly life. Aneesh emphasizes the contrast between the outside and the inside through descriptions of cafeteria lines, cubicles, midnight lunches, and motivational banners, together enunciating every-night logistics of call center life. Through his own experiences as well as those of informants, Aneesh offers a crisp narrative of the ways in which call center workers themselves recognize the paradoxical presence of disconnection in a workplace dependent upon making connections. This disconnection increases as workers who are made aware of the rituals, laws, and customs of the faraway places they service, find themselves unable to engage. They often indulge in tactics of deception in order to reach their sales targets, and Aneesh argues that the willingness to do so is abetted by the distance that workers feel from their clients. Such disengagement is also felt through frequent disconnects in translation and communicative breakdowns between customers and workers. In its focus on the materiality of the call center and its attempts at producing a neutral and global atmosphere, this chapter plays out in wonderful contrast to the previous description of Gurgaon and its history. However, the chapter would have benefited from pausing on ethnographic details and allowing the reader to make affective sense of the life of the call center, one that frequently fails in its attempts at both dislocation...