Shehzad Nadeem's Books

Dead Ringers

How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

By: Shehzad Nadeem

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Dead Ringers

How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

By: Shehzad Nadeem

A vivid portrait of India’s outsourcing industry In the Indian outsourcing industry, employees are expected to be "dead ringers" for the more expensive American workers they have replaced—complete with Westernized names, accents, habits, and lifestyles that are organized around a foreign culture in a distant time zone. Dead Ringers chronicles the rise of a workforce for whom mimicry is a job requirement and a passion. In the process, the book deftly explores the complications of hybrid lives and presents a vivid portrait of a workplace where globalization carries as many downsides as advantages. Shehzad Nadeem writes that the relatively high wages in the outsourcing sector have empowered a class of cultural emulators. These young Indians indulge in American-style shopping binges at glittering malls, party at upscale nightclubs, and arrange romantic trysts at exurban cafés. But while the high-tech outsourcing industry is a matter of considerable pride for India, global corporations view the industry as a low-cost, often low-skill sector. Workers use the digital tools of the information economy not to complete technologically innovative tasks but to perform grunt work and rote customer service. Long hours and the graveyard shift lead to health problems and social estrangement. Surveillance is tight, management is overweening, and workers are caught in a cycle of hope and disappointment. Through lively ethnographic detail and subtle analysis of interviews with workers, managers, and employers, Nadeem demonstrates the culturally transformative power of globalization and its effects on the lives of the individuals at its edges.

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Page Count

290

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691159653

ISBN 13

9780691159652

Dead Ringers

How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

By: Shehzad Nadeem

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Dead Ringers

How Outsourcing Is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves

By: Shehzad Nadeem

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

290

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691159653

ISBN 13

9780691159652

Mimetic Desires

Impersonation and Guising across South Asia

By: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath,Pamela Lothspeich

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Mimetic Desires

Impersonation and Guising across South Asia

By: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath,Pamela Lothspeich

Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, performance artists, and ritual participants, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic performance that is perceived as not one’s own, and guising as sartorial and kinetic play more generally. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the “real/original” and “fake/dupe,” Mimetic Desires refutes the ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate “up” and “down” social hierarchies. The book’s twelve chapters disclose sites and processes of sociopolitical power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion—and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious rituals. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance in South Asia’s theatrical and dance forms. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising.

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Page Count

305

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824894103

ISBN 13

9780824894108

Book's by Shehzad Nadeem

Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers

Mimetic Desires

Mimetic Desires

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