Un/accented: the politics of difference in US popular culture
This research examines the predominant U.S. race-based discourses surrounding the first five seasons of the South Asian American-led network television show, The Mindy Project . Through a textual analysis of the show, its news coverage, and live interviews with its showrunner Mindy Kaling, it reveals the subjectivation of Kaling as the "angry woman of colour" and exposes the profound anxieties that result when diasporic subjects challenge the boundaries between margin and centre. Drawing from feminist and postcolonial theories, this paper uncovers the relationship between "progressive" journalistic knowledge production and colonial-capitalist logics. It finds a reproduction of the "native-as-lack" cloaked within discourses of "diversity" and "reality" as well as an expectation that the diasporic showrunner shows her "authenticity" through the self-appropriation of her Otherness.