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Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film, by shilpa s. Davé. Urbana: University of illinois Press, 2013. 208 pp. $75.00 hardcover. isBN: 978-0-252-03740-5. $25.00 paperback. isBN: 978-0-252-07893-4.
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...