Transnational America

Grewal examines transnational formations inside and outside of the Unites States by looking at “the production of middle class Asian Indian and American subjects in the 1990s” (1).  She uses many different modes of analysis, but each larger scale example/chapter seems to boil down the idea of subject formation, whether a consumer of Barbie, readers of Indian novels, or someone who utilizes a helpful organization.  Neoliberal policies intersect with gender, race, class, nationalism, and location to create a subject in a particular form.

One particularly interesting point of her study involves the imagines creation of what is American, and how that idea has been propagated through neoliberal policies and consumer culture.  There seems to be a difference between the United States, as an imperialist, powerful, neoliberal entity, and America as a multicultural, melting pot whose way of life is idealized and something to achieve.  In the past few weeks we have seen how neoliberal and imperialist policies have affected countries differently.  The ICIs were different from what happened with families in the Philippines, and those were different from the view of tourism given in Kincaid’s work.  Then again here we see something different with the way Indian consumers reacted.  They all show complex ties of power and subjugation and reveal “transnational connectivities” that are important to Grewal’s work.

Grewal states that the United States was able to promote the power of whiteness, but also the idea of being a global nation into what it meant to be American (9).  This is most apparent in her example of white Barbie in an Indian sari.  The influence of the World Bank and IMF in India during the 1980s opened up India’s economy to foreign governments, and gave those governments access to new markets and consumers.  This chapter also shows how the American ideal of whiteness is not always successful in its pure form.  Barbie sales in India did not take off until Barbie wore an Indian sari, which shows negotiation occurring within the transnational markets (80-120).   So, while Barbie was still white, the doll had to take on a multicultural quality (the sari) in order to produce transnational consumers for Mattel.

Briana