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Conclusion Returning the Call The coolest thing [about call centers] is the infrastructure. We have access to everything over here. The toughest thing I face is to take care of my health because of the timing, and on and off. At times we have to work when we used to sleep and at times you have to, you know, vice versa. —yadav, 365-Call, focus group interview, 2006 174 The Indian call center industry, as Yadav suggests, is a vexed site of possibility and constraint, of increased access to modern subjectivities and of inverted temporal lives. For agents like Yadav, call center life is both the “coolest thing” (it provides the infrastructure, cultural capital, and labor practices, giving them “access to everything over here”) and the “toughest thing” (the health issues caused by the “on and off timing”). Yadav is an agent on whom the long hours have taken a toll. He complains about his health even as he enjoys the material benefits of his job. The center is designed to meet his needs: cafeteria, gym, and recreation rooms. As we’ve traced over the course of Answer the Call, this both/and quality permeates the industry and animates the lives of those who labor within its structures . The labor and technological forms that organize the Indian call center industry are leveraged toward new time-space relations, giving agents “access to everything over here.” But they do so at a cost as the agents’ bodies mark the limits of the elasticity of virtual globality. The ongoing communication activity of answering the calls of American consumers over the course of the night shift generates a sense of movement and migration, of assimilation and in-between-ness. Our readings of call center workers’ stories track the various ways agents turn in response to these repeated hailings. We find that agents are interpellated into a host of global and national power relations, neoliberal disciplinary technologies, and disparate time-space structures. These forces recalibrate and hybridize their already hybrid identities. conclusion 175 The time-space terrain that animates Yadav’s account, as with those we’ve tracked throughout this study, maps the here and the there onto national and transnational geographies and temporalities. The Indian call center industry converges, collapses, and remixes social geographies and the rhythms by which they move. By “here,” Yadav references both India and the physical place of the call center; each becomes collapsed into, or is mutually constitutive of, the other. We witnessed this theme in chapter 4 as agents mobilize Indian citizenship through their participation in mediated global interactions: the local and the national are not sacrificed through agents’ participation in the transnational but rather enhanced by it. As India becomes increasingly visible on the global stage, so too do call center agents become increasingly audible to faraway others. Thus the neoliberal project of Indian nation building converges with globalized call center labor. This convergence gives agents a sense of participation in neoliberal sites of inclusion while simultaneously fortifying their participation in the project of nation building. Yet the exportation of American jobs associated with the call center industry, and outsourcing more broadly, produces a sense of anxiety for many Americans. Chapter 1 explores the production and management of such anxieties in reality-based programming. These productions seek to alleviate sensibilities of invasion and loss through the reassertion of clear temporal and spatial distances between here and there, now and then. However, we find in chapter 4 that the compulsion by some American callers to police the virtual borderlands of the call center exchange suggests that such reassurances do not alleviate these anxieties. Rather, they animate the virtual space of the phone call, which becomes a site in which U.S. racism is mobilized in an oral/aural sphere. The unevenness of the exchange is apparent in the fact that while call center agents are expected to attain fluency in the current football and baseball scores in the United States, there is no expectation that American callers would have any knowledge or interest in the latest victories of the Indian cricket team. These arguments suggest that as new information technologies generate virtual transnational connectivities, the layering of mediated and physical spaces with power differentials continues to complicate any easy timespace conflations and crossings. The here and the there, the territorial boundaries between nations, and the now and the then are no longer (if they ever were) so easily demarcated . Because clear spatial and temporal distinctions territorialize the [3...

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