| Re-Modeling Minority examines how the global reach of the Indian fashion, film and beauty industries informs the cultural politics of contemporary South Asian American diasporic artists. Specifically, the project shows how constructions of cosmopolitan Indian femininity within an era of multinational capital travel beyond the postcolonial Indian nation-state and become sites of cultural contestation within a popular South Asian American diasporic imagination. The project considers a range of cultural production, including print media, fiction, drama, and performance art.;After establishing the way that a neoliberal consumer subject is consolidated through discourses of "global" Indian feminine beauty and fashion within a dominant national imaginary, the dissertation turns to the ways that artists such as Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni, and Shailja Patel map the local, national and transnational itineraries of this "global" feminine body from the vantage point of a North American diaspora. I read for the way that these artists--to various degrees, through various strategies, and with various degrees of success--mobilize this body in order to track the contradictions of global neoliberalism in the production of gendered and racialized subjectivities.;The artists under investigation here are highly visible in transnational public spheres, so they are inevitably open to charges of trafficking in and reproducing narratives of cultural nationalism, liberal multiculturalism, and new forms of orientalism that can (and often do) function so seamlessly in the interests of transnational capital. While I am careful to point out these narratives as they emerge, I also show that these various circulations of the glamorized, hyper-feminine Indian body produce trenchant critiques of transnational capitalist exchange, colonial modernity and the global economic and cultural hegemony of a transnational South Asian bourgeoisie that complicate these narratives. Moving beyond critique, moreover, I aim to show how this body becomes a particularly rich--if contentious--site for imagining critical forms of local, national and transnational social belonging. |
