Shilpa Davé’s book, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, deconstructs an American speech practice Davé refers to as “brown voice.” The practice, in which a non-Indian uses a fabricated accent to imitate Indian Americans, creates a set of expectations of cultural otherness and model minority status. Consequently, the perception of Indian Americans associated with the voice remains perpetually locked in unintegrated success.
One example Davé lists for the established otherness of South Asian characters is the Simpsons episode “Much Apu About Nothing.” Davé describes how the character Apu attempts to present himself as an integrated member of American society in the episode through a fabricated American accent, but the humor of the episode arises because “we [the audience] know that Apu is not culturally American… we expect him to speak English with an accent” (Davé, 315). Another example is the early radio practice of Great Britain’s BBC announcements. The radio station, in an effort to establish its credence with the population, fakes an “upper-class Oxford English accent even though most of the population spoke with an entirely different phonetic deviation” (Davé, 319).
In her analysis of brown voice, Davé relates the concept to minstrelsy. Minstrelsy also sees white actors perform as racialized caricatures, but it remains a more contentious subject than brown voice due to the visually public presence of its actors. Davé also contrasts brown voice with Homi Bhabha’s definition of mimicry. Davé describes mimicry as an imperfect imitation of one’s colonizers with the fundamental otherness “exposing the performer to ridicule” (Davé, 326). She argues that brown voice differs because it allows the performers to decide how their audience should receive them and subsequently the race they perform.
Davé’s conclusions on the ramifications of brown voice parallel Sylvia Chong’s concept of the “forever foreigner.” Chong uses the term in her article Orientalism to explain how the concept of Orientalism limits the Asian American ability to assimilate into mainstream American culture. However, Davé concludes her thoughts on brown voice with the works of Indian American directors who subvert brown voice expectations to expand the possible roles that South Asian bodies can display. From this we should ask, what possible solutions exist to combat the larger expectations of Orientalism as a whole?
Sources:
Shilpa Davé, East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, New York University Press (2005), pp 313-336
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, Keywords for Asian American Studies, New York University Press (2015), pp 182-185