Paper Short Abstract:

The figure of the Indian call centre worker has inspired popular representation as also scholarly work over the last twenty years. This paper examines the mimetic work of the subjects of this economy in these accounts—accent, comportment, desire—as symptoms to read the pathologies of a global world.

Paper Abstract:

Over the last twenty years, the figure of the Indian call centre worker has inspired popular representation as either the poster child of globalization on the one hand, or in Praful Bidwai's term, “cyber-coolie” on the other. At the same time, a substantial body of scholarly work has focused on the experience and specificities of call centre work. In looking back and reviewing this literature, I juxtapose it with popular representations on call centre work in India, in order to ask how the seemingly mimetic work of the subjects of this economy—accent, comportment, desire—may allow us a window into the pathologies inherent to imitation in a globalized world. I examine documentary, popular film, and fiction to ask how one might in hindsight locate the period of the 2000s as a set of symptoms to read the global economy's foray into India as distinctly pathological.

The French historian, literary critic and philosopher, René Girard famously theorized desire as mimetic and contagious. For Girard (1965), the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other’s desire; in other words, he posits the true nature of desire to be a chimera because it functions only through an endless hall of mirrors. In this paper, I locate the work of desire as operationalized and made manifest through imitation in a manner distinguishing it from both Naipaul's tragic mimic man, or Bhabha's unintentionally subversive one, and instead as a symptom of a pathological globalization, nevertheless continuous with the colonial project.