Imagining the Indian IT Body
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Published:July 2016
This chapter uses political cartoons and ethnographic interviews to document the racialized depiction of Indian IT workers. These sources show the multifaceted nature of the discussion of race in public. Indian programmers are ambivalent subjects between Turkish guest workers and Afro-German migrants in German national debates around immigration and assimilation. Comparing these images and their narratives with the production of difference in the office, this chapter demonstrates how office culture uses liberal, tolerant notions of race even while it sediments office hierarchies through folk theories of cultural difference. It argues that postgenomic uncertainty over whether race is a fixed or malleable property of human populations makes race newly important in assessing the equally uncertain futures that neoliberal capitalism promises for working populations, especially those from elsewhere.
Bibliography
Sarkar Committee, Central Bureau of Education, India. “Development of Higher Technical Institutions in India (Interim Report of the Sarkar Committee),” 1946.