MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Where Web 2.0 was supposed to dissolve social structures such as race and class, it has, instead, positioned all content creators/consumers as entrepreneurial agents, thereby allowing the process of racialization to continue along virtual labor lines. To study this phenomenon, I will look at Canadian-Indian YouTuber, Lilly Singh, whose parents immigrated to Canada when she was a little girl. Touted as an example of the ways in which new media provides opportunity for neoliberal entrepreneurial agency, Singh embodies caricatures of her parents in her comedy sketches. What initially began as critique of Indian parenting has since evolved into the performance of full-fledged characters: Manjeet, the bumbling brown father, and Paramjeet, the conservative but smart brown mother, both of whom have their own Instagram accounts, carefully curated by Singh.

I will examine the way in which racialized diasporic communities are read globally through a study of Singh’s body of work. By dissecting the Instagram pictures in particular, and drawing on theories of diaspora and performance, I will argue that identity on the Internet is as much a cultural and social positioning as it is in the real world. Diasporic performances online continue to be taken as being representational of the home-land, which exists only in the immigrant’s memory. Despite the access that Singh (as a First-World citizen) has, she still plays into colonial discourses to make her mark as an entrepreneurial content creator, performing brown-ness as a backward and conservative identity. Diasporic content online thus capitalizes on the fetishization of racialized bodies and homogenization of all diasporic subjectivities for the white consumer gaze, as users of Web 2.0 platforms like Youtube and Instagram play into racist and capitalist discourses that present the Third World as backward and the West as liberalizer than can provide them with education and democracy.