22 Identity II (Caste, Class Gender, Race)

Dr. Neeraja Sundaram

Caste and Identity

Part 1 of this Unit on Identity focused on how this identity as a concept is defined and understood within Cultural Studies and the various processes through which it is negotiated within society. Caste is a significant marker through which individuals and groups make sense of their “selves” or “identities” in India. Caste accords social status, organizes religious and cultural beliefs and stratifies individuals and groups in society according to certain “essential” characteristics. You will remember from the first part of this unit on Identity that one of the significant ways in which we understand our “self” is on the basis of “non-self” or what we perceive as “other”. Our understanding of our caste identity is also similarly based on a sense of difference, on a belief in “inherent” differences between groups of individuals that are ascribed as belonging to internally homogenous and socially discrete units. Identity is theorized within cultural studies as a critique of the autonomous, essential self and caste identity has to be similarly critiqued for its foundation in a fixed and essential mode of understanding individuals and groups in society. Casteism is a mode of recognizing or identifying individuals as belonging to a particular “caste” which is rooted in exclusionary, dominating, exploitative and discriminatory practices. Caste identity for instance is understood in a powerfully hierarchical manner, with certain castes like the Brahmans situated in a dominant and elite position and others like Dalits that are even deemed “untouchable” or polluting. This hierarchy is constructed and disseminated as discourse, with dominant caste groups producing, controlling and perpetuating knowledge about the structure within which all caste groups are understood. The caste ordering that situates Brahmans at the top and Dalits at the lower end of the social spectrum for instance, draws from Brahmanical texts like the Manusmriti and the Yagnavalkyasmriti. This caste order is perpetuated and contested through origin stories that designate caste status as historical fact. Jotiba Phule, the leader of the nineteenth-century Maharashtrian non-Brahman movement for instance, posited that the shudras or those designated as “lower caste” by the Brahmans in fact belonged to the Kshatriya or warrior clan of pre-Aryan times. Such an origin story challenges the normative understanding of Brahmans as historically dominant and superior and posits instead that those now designated as “lower caste” were merely displaced by foreign invaders. Origin stories are thus a crucial way in which the discursive construction of a dominant caste identity is challenged and contested. Religious conversion is another way in which discursive constructions of superior and inferior caste identities are rejected or abandoned. B.R Ambedkar, the iconic leader of Scheduled Castes like Mahars and the architect of the Indian Constitution famously converted to Buddhism but also publicly disavowed any associations that Hindus normally drew between Buddha and Vishnu. Rejecting the Hindu belief that Buddha was an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu allowed Ambedkar to break free from the system of thought within which ideas of caste superiority and inferiority were deriving meaning. Caste identity is therefore not an inherent property or an essential characteristic that an individual possesses but is put in place by a discourse of culture that hierarchizes lifestyles, professions, religious and cultural customs through various authority figures located in our socio-economic milieu like religious texts and institutions and the family.

Individuals and the caste groups to which they belong thus perform their differences in the form of food habits, propagating shared myths of origin, the practice of religion with its attendant prescriptions of taboo and prohibition. Brahmans and Jains thus perform their difference by abstaining from meat and adhering to several culinary restrictions, for instance. Caste identity is inscribed physically and materially and is thus performed and understood as an activity that has consequences for an individual’s physical and material embeddedness in society. Caste based marriage is thus understood as ensuring unpolluted social standing and progeny. Popular websites like Bharat Matrimony and matrimonial advertisements in major newspapers in India classify clients’ profiles according to caste identity. Several matrimonial advertisements insist on a bride or groom being “vegetarian” in addition to specifying their caste preferences thereby making a distinction between a “natural” or “essential” attribute and the practice or performance of this as identity. The practice of “honor killing” still abounds in India where “errant” individuals who defy the marital restrictions of their caste based communities are seen as polluting the “honor” of their families or communities. Caste identity is thus embedded in the socio-cultural context of the individual who is understood simultaneously as being vulnerable to and as the source of pollution. Moreover, the individual’s right to determine his/her caste identity is subsumed by the family or community’s collective right to an uncontested/unpolluted social standing. Since caste identity is inextricable from the individual’s material and physical contexts, defined and articulated as it is in the cultural imaginary in terms of “blood ties”, shared mythical ancestors and ways of participating in civil society, it is understood as a filial transfer of values and beliefs and as interpellation. You will remember from the first part of this Unit that interpellation is a crucial aspect of identity formation where an individual’s location in relation to scarce socio-economic resources is naturalized by making the structural processes that determine this location invisible. Thus, the Hindu Brahmanical model of ascribing hierarchical caste identities that conflated social identities with occupational roles is rejected or resisted by castes designated as “polluting” or “low” for its designation of oppressive social relations as “natural” or “inherent”(menial duties like scavenging are often performed and subsequently inherited by Dalit communities).

The 2001 cult Indian film Lagaan is a good instance of how dominant discourse continues to view caste identity as “essential” or inherent. Lagaan narrates a fictional account of how a small village in colonial India manages to win a wager with their colonial administrators, granting them freedom from oppressive taxes. The major part of the film focuses on the wager itself, which involves playing a game of cricket with the British rulers of the village. The villagers set about putting together a team, which also comprises an untouchable, named ‘kachra’ in the film. ‘Kachra’, literally meaning garbage or waste, designates this character in accordance with his occupation and status in the village – as scavenger. He is thus visibly marked by his caste identity through his very name, in a manner that none of the other fictional occupants of the village are. His ‘untouchable’ status is moreover depicted very visibly in the film, through the others’ strong reservations to his inclusion in the team and the protagonist’s magnanimous lobbying for utilizing his talent in the team. Kachra’s caste identity is visibly depicted only to serve as a “test” for the latent humanitarian spirit present in the other characters. Moreover, Kachra’s “talent” and basis for being included on the team is a physical deformity/disability that affects his hand but enables him to perform spin bowling. Kachra’s body is thus marked as being “inherently” deviant, a quality that allows him to serve only one purpose on the team – to be a spin bowler. Kachra is a landless occupant in the fictional village and would as such be unaffected (or at least not affected as a socio-economic equal) by the British taxation laws. His inclusion in the team thus does not equalize his status with the other citizens of the village – his is included in a menial capacity that reflects his off-field social strata.

Class and Identity

Class, like caste can also be understood as a hierarchical mode of social stratification where society is seen to be divided into a few major social units on the basis of access to social, cultural and economic resources. While caste stratifies society on the basis of an understanding of an ‘essential’ purity that prevents the co-mingling or interaction of individuals belonging to different caste groups, class divides individuals on the basis of their ownership or control over economic and cultural resources. Within traditional Marxist thought, scholars identified two major economic groups within industrial societies that were eternally in conflict on account of their access to and control over social and economic power. Therefore, the dominant or upper class was the capitalist, bourgeois or feudal landlord who owns the economic resources or the means of production in the industrial society like the factory, land and wealth. The lower class or laboring class comprise the workers whose only asset is their laboring bodies which exist in an exploitative relationship with the upper classes. The profits that are gained from the production process are unequally shared by the two classes, with the workers receiving only a small share for the utilization or investment of their labor. These classes are in conflict on account of the differences in their social status and power and the exploitative distribution of profits from the production process. The dominant or upper classes seek the perpetuation of such an economic relation where the working classes accept their subjugated status. The exploitative nature of the economic relations between classes is naturalized via several ideological processes and institutions. Ideology can be defined as a set of coherent ideas or beliefs that are controlled and disseminated by the ruling or dominant class in order to make unequal social or economic relations appear ‘natural’. Ideology is disseminated and controlled by the upper classes through their ownership and control over religion, educational institutions and the mass media. The upper classes thus perpetuate their dominance not only through economic but social and cultural power as well. Marxist scholars seek to uncover the exploitative economic conditions and unequal social relations that are reflected in or concealed by cultural texts. Cultural texts comprise the lifestyle, behavior, consumption patterns, religious and moral beliefs and social mores that become associated with different classes. Class identity within cultural studies is understood as the process of interaction between an individual’s diverse material contexts (social, physical, economic and cultural context) and the representation of these material contexts or social experiences in dominant cultural forms. Sociologists have theorized that in modern capitalistic societies, class conflict and identity is not only restricted to a dominant upper class and an exploited lower or working class but is in fact contested and negotiated in multiple ways in the ‘marketplace’. Therefore, the class to which an individual belongs may not only depend on his/her relationship to the means of production, but also depends on the level of skill, occupation and measure of access to resources. Individuals living in a contemporary urban environment may thus belong to the professional class of managers or administrators and may possess specialized skills and knowledge that distinguish them from manual workers or laborers. Such a ‘professional’ class or ‘educated’ elite may thus identify with the cultural and social mores of the upper classes rather than with working class or middle class values.

In the first part of this lesson we noted how a person’s identity may be ‘fashioned’ or continuously worked on as a ‘project’. Class identity, as we have seen, is based not only in economic terms like ownership of means of production or capital but also depends upon cultural and social power. In the case of the ‘professional’ class in urban environments, class identity is a matter of aspiration and involves the ‘performance’ of an identity through particular consumption patterns and the ‘cultivation’ of a particular sensibility. The manager or administrator for instance, although a member of the working class in terms of not exerting direct control over the means of production and being paid a ‘salary’ in exchange for his/her labor, seeks to distance and distinguish himself/herself from those situated lower in the occupational hierarchy of the workplace. Class identity is packaged in soap operas, the contemporary blockbuster film and advertisements for consumer goods as one that can be acquired through maximizing and perpetuating one’s consumption. The ownership of private property, individualizing or personalizing the interiors of one’s home, sporting a favored ‘brand’ and ‘creating’ a ‘new’ look for oneself are the ‘markers’ of a class identity that are packaged as readily available for anyone. Consider the real estate print advertisement (AV1) featuring prospective inhabitants of the apartments being sold engaging in various leisurely activities. Here, an ‘upper class’ identity is being packaged and sold alongside the apartments, the tangible or material focus of the advertisement. Consumers are being invited to imagine themselves within locales that are associated in our cultural imaginary (novels, films, soap operas regularly feature members of the upper class as not actively engaged in labor) with members of the upper class – playing golf, tennis and relaxing by the side of a pool are suggestive of an elite life of leisure. The advertisement is also prescriptive in its suggestion of an elite lifestyle – ‘more space’ indicates the necessity a large home irrespective of individual need, the lifestyle activities that are pictured like tennis, swimming and golf are all ‘cultivated’ interests/hobbies that require access to resources and an investment of time. The advertisement here prescribes the ‘performance’ necessary to embrace the class identity symbolized by the ownership of property while erasing the labor that acquiring this property requires. The professional manager labors to accumulate the capital that he/she is being invited to invest and must perpetuate this labor to ‘perform’ his/her inclusion in the ‘class’ that is symbolized in the real estate advertisement. Class identity here comprises not only economic advantage/investment but a ‘cultivation’ or ‘learning’ of cultural and social habits as well.

The ‘improved’ edition of The Hindu’s supplement, Metro Plus (AV 2) was packaged through a series of print advertisements that featured a model performing various ‘hobbies’ and ‘interests’ and carried the tag line ‘Have more interests, Be more interesting’. Metro Plus regularly covers ‘cultural’ events in the city relevant to the edition and carries articles about new restaurants and eateries, pubs, fashion trends and shopping avenues and essentially maps and prescribes consumption patterns. The models featured on the advertisements for the ‘improved’ Metro Plus are shown in a stage of gradual transformation – one of the advertisements for instance, feature a woman whose first stage is represented as a regular urban working class girl and her gradual transformation is mapped through the addition of headphones, a wire whisk (presumably for mixing cake batter) and apron and a palette with several smudges of paint. The woman is also seen to shed the formal aspect of her clothing that she began her transformation with – her jacket is replaced by the apron. While the advertisement seeks to map the transformation of a serious working woman transitioning to participating in leisure and recreational activities, it also suggests a certain fluidity of identity that can be acquired with the consumption of a particular lifestyle and lifestyle products. In the last stage of her transformation (pictured on the twitter page of Metro Plus), the woman simultaneously bears markers of all these interests – she is holding the palette, whisk, wearing the apron and headphones. Class identity is sold here in the Metro Plus’s characteristic vein of advertising various consumption avenues – a diversity of global cuisine, fashion and lifestyle products but also the ‘learning’ or ‘acquiring’ of interests to perform membership in a particular class. The ‘new’ Metro Plus now invites readers to share their hobbies or interests with the promise that some may be ‘featured’ in the supplement. Class identity is thus portrayed as something than can be ‘learned’ or ‘acquired’, utilizing images of fluid and changeable selves while erasing the underlying inequalities in access to social and economic resources. Consumption of a particular lifestyle and lifestyle products is perpetuated here while the inequalities inherent in access to these are rendered invisible – learning to bake, paint and cultivating an interest in music requires an investment of time and economic resources that is made invisible while the overt ‘guarantee’ remains that it makes us ‘more interesting’.

Gender and Identity

The first part of this unit has examined how our understanding of our ‘selves’ derives not from an inherent or essential quality but from the repeated performance or assertion of particular ‘roles’. Gender identity is thus understood within cultural studies as the performance, repetition and recognition of particular social roles that are ‘learned’ or ‘acquired’ through an acculturation process. A person’s sex is thus determined as ‘male’ or ‘female’ in biological terms, however, one’s understanding of ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ is made sense of within culture. Certain kinds of behavior, emotions, roles and physical appearance in terms of dress and lifestyle become associated culturally with a particular gender. Feminine identity, for instance, is typically visualized within popular mass media forms like films and advertisements as involving the performance and repetition of particular roles – mother, object of desire, wife and homemaker. Consider this advertisement for a dishwashing soap (AV 3) where the labor of washing dishes is glamorized through the appearance, dress and the identifiable celebrity figure of Priyanka Chopra. Chopra is here selling a common household product and is made ‘recognizable’ through her visualization within the familiar environment of the kitchen. Her presence here is naturalized on account of the accumulated images in viewers’ minds of women performing household tasks on television, in films and advertisements for household products like clothes detergent, cleaning agents and cooking appliances. Each of these products, including the dishwashing soap represents a significant amount of labor that is made invisible in the advertisement through the visualizing of a completed task. Priyanka Chopra is here seen expending very little energy while simultaneously displaying proof of significant productivity. The volume of labor is seen to be an easy task for an ‘X-pert’, with the suggestion that just as the dishwashing soap ‘expertly’ cleans dirty dishes (its sole function that renders it saleable), so also the ‘woman’s’ expertise is what enables an efficient management of the kitchen/home. The ‘X- pert’ here is both the product as well as the woman, both of whom are conflated visually with a large volume of labor that is seen as easily manageable on account of an inherent or essential ‘expertise’ with such work. Socialist feminist scholars draw attention to the fact that women are often grouped within the same class identity as their husbands, while their performance of unpaid labor (like household duties of washing and cleaning) actually situates them in a disadvantaged position with respect to their male partners. Analyzing the gender identity of the woman portrayed in the dishwashing soap advertisement thus draws attention to the homogeneity/universalism of categories or social markers like class. In spite of being visualized within a middle-class setting (the woman is glamorously attired in a modern, furnished kitchen), the woman in the advertisement is naturalized in her role as the manager of the home, a role that in fact renders her economically invisible within the class symbolized by the household product.

Socially or culturally ‘constructed’ gender roles are thus naturalized as the inherent or natural quality that an individual possesses. A woman’s identity as ‘mother’ is similarly constructed by conflating biological and cultural roles. The circulation of images in the mass media constructing women as the providers of nurture, caregiving and physical support to children naturalizes their investment of labor at home in the rearing of a child. Advertisements for baby products for instance, rarely feature fathers performing the daily routines that circulate around the newborn. Johnson & Johnson’s line of baby products for instance, comprising soaps, shampoos and body oils designed for children, regularly feature only women performing the labor of bathing, cleaning, feeding and playing with their children. Consider this advertisement for Pampers baby wipes (AV 4) where the mother’s body is rendered invisible except for her protective embrace that supports the child. ‘Motherhood’ or the social role of being a mother and primary caregiver to the child is here visualized as something that does not even require a physical or bodily referent. While the child is placed prominently at the center of the advertisement, the mother’s body is present only as partially visible ‘hands’ that can belong to any woman, thereby naturalizing or universalizing the identity of all women as ‘mothers’. Moreover, the product’s name ‘Pampers’, is itself suggestive of an excess of care and caregiving labor. The mother’s ‘pampering’ is thus the only thing featured prominently in the advertisement thereby subsuming all other potential social ‘roles’ this woman could perform. The arrival of a child is thus signified here by a superseding of the mother’s individual rights to perform any role other than caregiving labor. The mother’s individual ‘rights’ to perform any other identity is thus superseded by those of the child, who represents the future generation. It is also only in the performing of the caregiving acts or rituals that surround the raising of a child (bathing, feeding, cleaning, playing, teaching and getting children to school on time are all staple images of rituals featured in advertisements selling children’s products that are performed exclusively by women) that a woman’s identity is ‘recognized’. You will recall from the first part of this unit that a key aspect of an individual’s identity is the repetition and performance of certain social roles but also the ‘recognition’ of these by others around us. Let us take the example of Gillette’s recent ad campaign intended to educate their male customer base about the necessity for women’s safety. Gillette’s shaving and grooming products typically feature advertisements that construct and circulate images of masculinity – they feature models that exude physical strength who are seen performing recognizable male grooming rituals like shaving that immediately result in becoming attractive or desirable to women. Like the advertisements for AXE deodorant, Gillette also features women only to underscore the ‘attractiveness’ or ‘desirability’ of the male model pictured using their product. These advertisements suggest that the only labor that needs to be expended by the man is towards grooming and paying attention to one’s appearance, which automatically translates into desirability and success with women. The ‘soldiers wanted’ campaign was thus an attempt to convey a more sensitive portrayal of women, however, to be ‘recognized’, the campaign relies on pre-existing stereotypes of masculine identity. The campaign for instance, focuses on the inherently ‘weak’ nature of the woman who needs to be ‘protected’ by a man. While ‘respecting’ women is what the campaign promotes, the ‘men’ who are called upon to be ‘soldiers’ featured in Gillette’s video campaign in the same series are in the characteristic vein of their earlier advertisements – physically strong and imposing. Being called on to be a ‘soldier’ is thus an iconic masculine ideal – someone who is strong, trained in combat and occupies an exclusive and rarefied role that has a long history of being a male domain. Performing one’s identity as a man here thus requires being physically ‘able’, capable of exerting violence but only if called upon to do so and for a just cause. The nation and the woman are conflated here as the ‘weak’ and ‘vulnerable’ feminine territory that requires protection from the ‘strong’, ‘able’ and righteous man.

Race and Identity

As has been examined above in the light of caste, gender and class identity, the material conditions of an individual/group is defined to a large extent by the construction, performance and recognition of identity. The representation of a particular identity within popular cultural texts, school text books, its definition within the law, religion and medicine and its recognition within a social group is inextricable from the material/physical attributes that ‘identify’ a person as belonging to a particular gender, class or caste. Race identity is similarly ‘attributed’ to a group of individuals or community based on overt physical differences in skin color and physical appearance. Race is marked hierarchically, with certain kinds of physical attributes like hair, skin color and the color and shape of the eyes being situated at the top and considered ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’ while others are thought to be ‘inferior’ or ‘ugly’. These physical attributes are often not the only basis of classification and hierarchizing but take on an additional dimension with certain kinds of behavior, emotions, cultural and social rituals being associated with particular ‘races’. The physical context of marking ‘race’ with respect to differences in physical appearance are therefore inextricable from the cultural and social context of ‘race’. Postcolonial scholars and practitioners of race studies study the identity of races inhabiting Asia and Africa for instance as being determined by their years of domination by European rulers. The predominantly ‘white’ rulers of these countries justified their domination of ‘non-white’ races on the basis of not only differences in physical appearance but in intelligence, civility, culture, knowledge and religious beliefs. White colonial administrators ‘produced’ or ‘constructed’ a particular image of the non- white races they were ruling through the systematic dissemination of knowledge about these races. This colonial ‘knowledge’ was backed by the social and political authority wielded by the white rulers as administrators and ‘scientific’ authority that ‘proved’ the racial inferiority of non- white races. This ‘knowledge’ would play a key role in determining how non-white races made sense of their ‘selves’ and were recognized by others. Racial identity thus determines a person’s rights to social and economic resources, power, his/her sense of belonging to a particular location (region/state/country), his/her sense of group affiliation.

Practitioners of cultural studies of science for instance, posit how Hollywood films and reports in the popular media and scientific journals in the late 20th century regularly portray the ‘source’ or ‘origin’ of epidemics like SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), Bird Flu and AIDS in countries like Asia and Africa. The ‘source’ of an epidemic is constructed using a repetition of images of ‘racial’ attributes of the host country. The ‘infection’ of ‘innocent’ races inhabiting the western world in imagined through the visualizing of differences between them and the country in which the epidemic originated. Images of overpopulation, crowded public transport, unsanitary practices and dirty and polluted environments are regularly featured alongside images of ‘infected’ people in the ‘source’ country. Race thus becomes a marker of not only physical attributes but extends to include social and cultural factors – the epidemic is thus seen to originate as a result of a weakness or inferiority present not only in the bodies of ‘other’ races but in their ways of life as well. ‘Difference’ is thus a crucial aspect of making sense of the racial ‘self’ and ‘other’, where exclusion, exploitation and discrimination are justified on the basis of hierarchies justified by scientific, religious and socio-cultural decree. Racial inferiority that extends to cultural and social mores is a staple of science fiction films and novels. Aliens, zombies and monsters are typically characterized as monstrously different on the basis of food habits, ways of inhabiting the world, manners and dress in addition to physical appearance. The mass extermination of these ‘monstrous’ races on screen is justified through the repeated visualizing of their ‘unsuitability’ within everyday social and cultural life. These zombies and aliens are violent, dirty, destroy human art and culture and are seen as incapable of maintaining social order. The Bollywood film Go Goa Gone, India’s first zombie film, features ‘white’ actors playing the zombies who are mercilessly killed throughout the film. It is set moreover in Goa and the zombie epidemic itself strikes at a rave party, seen as a staple feature of the place – the ‘white’ tourist is visualized here as the racial ‘other’ who participates in a violent drug culture that is seen as a cultural ‘import’ to be exterminated. The Indian/brown protagonists in the film perform their citizenship by purging the Goan landscape of alien ‘outsiders’ who are visualized in the film as also being racially ‘other’. Such popular cultural representations of racial hierarchy based on physical appearance as well as social and cultural mores and lifestyle that are viewed as ‘risky’, ‘immoral’ and inferior find echoes in media reports of ‘racial profiling’ in the United States where Arabs and Blacks are suspected of being prone to terrorism and violence based on differences in appearance and culture. The north-easterners in India are similarly stereotyped and discriminated against based not only on differences in physical appearance (they are racially marked) but on cultural and social mores like religious beliefs, dress and cuisine that are labelled deviant and non-Indian. The north-east states, for instance, are often seen as the repository or ‘source’ of HIV in India owing to the rampant use of intravenous drugs in this ‘culture’. Such a representation severs them from ‘innocent’ mainland Indians who are at risk of infection from dangerous ‘outsiders’.

Audio-Visual Quadrant

1. Real estate advertisement showcasing the performance of a particular ‘class’ lifestyle

2. The twitter page for TheHindu’sMetroPlus supplement offering diverse possibilities for performing class identity through varied consumption patterns:

Tweets by THMetroPlus

3. Dishwashing soap advertisement that locates the woman’s ‘expertise’ within the kitchen and the home

4. Advertisement for baby wipes that constructs the gendered identity of the ‘mother’

5. Gillette’s ad campaign for women’s safety

6. Screen shot of Bharat Matrimony, constructing caste identity by naturalizing their ‘partner search’ as the one preferred by the majority of ‘Indians’. This ‘partner search’ and its successful culmination in marriage is visualized here through the couple who are aligned visually alongside the ‘classificatory’ principles utilized by the website – gender, religion, caste and mother tongue. Their identities and compatibility are constructed here as a direct result of discrimination/elimination based on the ‘classification’ criteria offered on the website.

7. The following image and caption accompany a 2013 article in The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/ten-years-after-sars- now-we-have-mers-8640817.html) on a new strain of flu (H7N9) that ‘emerged’ in China. The article confesses that the both the ‘origin’ and ‘nature of transmission’ of these viruses is as yet unknown. The accompanying visual of a poultry market in Hong Kong however, ‘represents’ the racial characteristics that are being invoked to construct the identity of the ‘infected’ Chinese person. While the article states that no explicit scientific basis exists at the time for believing poultry to be infectious or even for human to human transmission of the virus, the visual clearly emphasizes the proximity of humans and poultry in the region depicted. Moreover, the unhygienic environment and overcrowded poultry cages in addition to the presence of a ‘smoker’ highlight the ‘unhealthy’ nature of a ‘foreign’ location believed to be the ‘origin’ of a disease.

The racial inferiority of the man in this image is thus constructed not purely on the basis of physical difference but through the attribution of unsanitary surroundings and ‘unhealthy’ practices that deem his geographical location and culture as the ‘source’ of disease or pollution.

‘A deadly virus alarms scientists, as a new flu strain appears in China’

Reference:

• Gupta, Dipankar (ed). Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy. Sage, 2004.
• Natarajan, Balmurli. The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age. Routledge, 2012.
• Torres, Rodolfo D., Louis F. Miron and Jonathan Xavier Inda. Race, Identity and Citizenship: A Reader. Blackwell, 1999.
• Woodward, Kath (ed).Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Ethnicity. Routledge, 2000.

Storyboarding/Instructional Design

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