Blog Post Week 5 Reading “Apu’s Brown Voice”

In this article, “Apu’s Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents” by Shilpa Dave, he argues that existence of different racial or cultural identity of South Asian from white. To explain this topic, he refers to animation character, Apu from “The Simpsons”. Apu is known as Indian immigrant and his English has “Indian accent” that is racialized performance, which contains cultural background of how they speak English, racial identity as a sign of Indian American and discrimination as model minority. In this animation, the character of Apu indicates how South Asians are understood or interpreted among American.

In this article, author mentioned, “Indian accents imply a model minority and in multicultural politics this is the type of minority the United States wants to promote because they fit the image of entrepreneurs, computer engineer, and successful immigrants in general” (p.318). This statement means South Asian could be understood as racial difference and their English could not be seen as natural things. Also, “brown voice” that their characteristic accent is the cultural performative practice of manipulating that makes white American think South Asian is non-native speaker. Therefore, the performance of brown voice by South Asian who recognized as successful foreigner could not establish their any kind of presence in American communities.

The key term of this article is “brown voice”. Author indicates that “the practice of brown voice ensures that although Indians are striving to cultural citizenship, the nature of the accent will always be read as foreign and the racial hierarchies of the United States will remain intact.” (p.327) This is one of discrimination that although they have class privilege of success, they are recognized as foreign with only one accent, which lead to ambiguous nature of South Asian racial and cultural identity. Also, brown voice and character of Apu makes us realize that there are stereotype and ethnicity beyond the visual.

This article about “brown voice” could connect to another article “assimilation” by Lisa Sun-Hee Park. In this article, there is statement about “the model minority myth”. This notion represents racial discrimination through assimilation. South Asian are known as successful immigrants but in fact they have difficult problem that they could not be recognized as citizen. We could realize that the vocalization of the model minority also generates the stereotype for them and makes South Asian people feel unpleasant among their life. I think we should rethink what type of cultural stereotype exists except for physical and visual. That might lead many people to be able to see foreigner equally without holding stereotypical notion.