In Shilpa Dave’s article, Apus’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents he introduces the his theory “brown voice” through the analyzation of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’s character on the popular television show “The Simpsons” to argue how American stereotypes of South Asians inaccurately give us an understanding of South Asians through speech, history and identity surrounding perceptions on south Asians accents and ultimately hinder South Asian Americans ability to move away from these generalizations. Throughout the article Dave’s reveals how speech, accent, history play a big role in the understanding of South Asian Americans and the misconceptions of the stereotypes and how media and other factors influence how these stereotypes occur.
Dave introduces the term “brown voice” a term used to identify a specific racializing trait among South Asians which simultaneously connotes foreignness, class and cultural privileges to explain the character of Apu in relation to the ambiguity surrounding South Asian “ethnic and racial classification” and the differences of the south Asians (314). Due to the British colonization of India, some South Asians have adapted some aspects of British colonialism and assimilation and therefore have “ambiguous racial identity” of not fitting in the Caucasian category because “the common man saw them as colored” while also not identifying with the “Asian American” because of their “historical and physical differences” being a model minority and further differences are explained through Dave’s concept of accents to that of “ the concept of cultural citizenship” South Asians accent in the English language(316). Dave further explains that the word stress plays an important factor in determining that South Asian English is different than the stereotypical Asian American English in which the word stress structure is completely different because Indians tend to stress syllables but is just an adaption of the English language and that with brown voice it is associated “not only with the model minority… but the privileged minority” and the type of minority that “the united states wants to promote”(318). Dave argues that these kinds of generalizations hinder the perception of south Asians and prevent their presence in America outside of character such as Apu. Dave also uses the analyzation of Apu’s character and “brown voice” to explain the concept behind animations disconnect from race and body to explain that when it comes to entertainment in the process of animation “race transitions from physical performance to voice performance” highlighting that in the terms of the Simpsons character Apu media has just focused on “how cultural categorizations of religion and marriage emphasize the foreignness nature of South Asians” through the fact that the voice actor for Apu is not South Indian and had learned his accent through “Indian and Pakistani clerks” which shows the writers lack of understanding of South Asians and their categorization into one group despite their differences in “linguistic, religious, cultural and political histories”(324). Dave concludes that the move from physical and vocal will be a benefitting factor in the growing the “privileged positions of South Asians in pop culture” and that this move is already beginning (331).
The main cultural ideas that were mentioned in this article were assimilation, cultural identity and the main one being the model minority. This reading connects a lot with a pervious article by Sun Hee Park called “Assimilation” in that they both show how assimilation relates to the “model minority” in the case of Parks essay she relates that the model minority is a myth because it doesn’t apply to all types of Asians and is a byproduct of perceptions and stereotypes od Asian Americans which relates to this article in that the vernalization sand stereotypes of South Asians through the representation of Apu are in fact incorrect and hinder the growth of South Asians since it keeps them boxed in that “model minority myth” and image.