Master of None and Stuart Hall’s theory of Cultural Identity

When Netflix released the first season of Master of None at the end of 2015 it was heralded by numerous critics as the cherry on top of a golden year for Asian-American representation on mainstream television (Alex Jung, 2015; Huang, 2016; Manansala, 2016; Shetty, 2015; Sreedharan, 2016). Co-written by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, Master of None chronicles the life of Dev Shah — played by Ansari — an aspiring actor living in New York and second generation Indian-American, whose parents migrated from Tamil Nadu in the 1980s. Across ten episodes which address various social issues such as sexism, racism, parenthood, adultery, dating, and ‘old people’* amongst others, the audience witnesses Dev reluctantly attempting to assess the direction he wants his life to follow. Interwoven in this episodic handling of cultural themes are two underlying story arcs wherein Dev experiences the rise and fall of both a promising acting job and a romantic relationship.

In the season finale we witness Dev’s fullest realisation that he is “fighting the pull of maturity” (Poniewozik, 2015), as a disastrous movie premiere and some particularly effusive wedding vows push him into a full existential crisis. Set to a voice-over narration of the famous ‘fig tree’ passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1971: 62–63), the season concludes with a poignant reflection on the capacity of indecision in the face of overwhelming options to paralyse the modern individual, neatly echoing Dev’s failure to acquire any tacos in his quest for ‘the best tacos’ which opens the episode.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” ― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

In its representation of Dev’s confrontation with almost unlimited options and complete freedom to choose who he wants to be, Master of None opens itself to existentialist analysis along the lines of Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “existentialism is a humanism”: that human identity is formed, first and foremost by the decisions and actions of humans, rather than by some predetermined essence of humanity (Sartre, 1945). For Sartre, the main claimant to the determination of human identity against which he argues is the theistic proposal of a creator god by whom the essence of human nature is designed.

In Master of None it is not a religious essentialism against which Dev is portrayed as struggling to carve out his own identity, but the cultural norms and products which surround him with blueprints for various alternative lives and their associated cultural identities. In the face of cultural essentialisms of more or less violent implications, Dev and friends more often than not pursue the radical freedom to act first and reflect on cultural identity second. To quote Sartre, Dev “first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards” (1945).

The notion of a diasporic cultural identity is introduced in the second episode, Parents, in which Dev and Brian — Dev’s friend and son of Taiwanese immigrants — endeavour to discover more about their parents’ experiences as immigrants to the United States. Cultural identity is then addressed more explicitly in the descriptively titled fourth episode Indians on TV, in which Dev and another actor friend, Ravi, encounter racist forms of both representation and lack thereof in the course of interviewing for television parts. Master of None is thus not only notable for its cultural contribution in representing Asian-American lives, but also because the characters through which it does so are themselves engaged in navigating issues of ‘under-’ or ‘mis-’ representation and in negotiating their own cultural identities.

In its representation of characters for whom identity is very much a work in progress, Master of None perfectly lends itself to Stuart Hall’s argument that identity should not be thought of as “an already accomplished fact” but as “a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (1990: 222). With particular reference to the two aforementioned episodes, I will now attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of Hall’s theory of cultural identity in illuminating the role of representation in producing hybrid cultural identities within Master of None as well as reflecting on the identity constructing effects of Master of None as a piece of culture, that is to say a representation, in and of itself.

Parents

In Cultural Identity and Diaspora Stuart Hall reconfigures the conceptual relationship between cultural identity and representation. One account of cultural identity, against which Hall reformulates his own perspective, holds that cultural identity is best considered “a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding amongst the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed selves” (1990: 224) which reflects a shared history amongst a people group and, in its commonality, provides “stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (224). Hall frames this version of cultural identity as hinging on “points of similarity” (225), which constitute a kind of “fixed essence”(226), to be excavated and rediscovered. Hall’s alternative position takes these ideas and subverts them: instead of depending solely on commonalities, cultural identity can be constituted by “points of deep and significant difference” (225); far from being some “universal and transcendental spirit” which lies “outside history and culture” (226), cultural identity is instead construed as being produced within the “memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (226) which underpin the telling and re-telling of history as well as the currency of cultural discourse.

The narration of history is therefore a key method by which cultural identity is produced by the re(-)presentation of the past. In Parents, Dev and Brian realise that they are both somewhat disconnected from their parents, both on a personal, emotional level, and also in their lack of familiarity with their biographical pasts, after a friend of Ramesh — Dev’s dad — reveals in an act of historical re(-)presentation that at Dev’s current age, Ramesh would still have been working in a zipper factory. Brian provides the punchline: “Instead, Dev lives here. Where his biggest problem is that the wi-fi is messed up in his apartment”. Dev asks Brian what he knows about his own father’s backstory.

BRIAN
Yeah, I mean, I know the big points: he was poor. He was in another country. It was tough. And then he came here. I got the gist of it.
DEV
Isn’t that the “gist” of every immigrant’s story? That they immigrated and it was hard? Shouldn’t you be slightly more interested in your dad’s story, being that he is your dad?
BRIAN
Yeah, but again, he doesn’t talk much. I once found a photo of him in the military. He just said “hard time” and went to another room.
DEV
Isn’t it weird, all of us first generation kids, we have these amazing lives all because our parents made these crazy sacrifices?

Dev’s identification of similarity between the histories of immigrants and his self-identification with Brian as both part of a cultural identity of “first generation kids” echoes Stuart Hall’s identification of “Martiniquains and Jamaicans as both the same and different” and yet both representative of Caribbean identity (1990: 227–228). Despite their parents’ origins in India and Taiwan respectively, Dev and Brian re(-)present a cultural identity of Asian-American immigrant children thoroughly estranged from the histories and places of their specific parent cultures. Evidence of the production of a hybrid identity is also evident between Dev’s parents and Brian’s father. At the dinner that the sons arrange to attempt to find out more about their parents’ histories Peter, Brian’s father, and Fatima, Dev’s mother, bond over the presentation of a shared memory of fear to answer the phone.

FATIMA
I was scared to answer the telephone because I had an accent and people would yell at me that they couldn’t understand.
PETER
I was also scared to answer the phone. They yell so much! “What?” “Huh!” I just got to the country! Why are they so mad?

Here, accents act as both a point of similarity and a point of difference in producing a shared Asian-American identity through the presentation of memory, between these two immigrants from different Asian countries and also in contrast with the ‘pure’ American cultural identity. In this example as well as in Hall, “America… — is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity and difference” (1990: 235), in which Asian-American identity may be represented through characters with different accents; through those, like Ramesh, who serve Indian snacks at home but also those, like Dev, who prefer tacos or pasta; and by characters with strong connections to and memories of other nations, potentially of origin, as well as those connected only to a simple gist of their international origin or ancestral migration story. All these representations of Asian-American cultural identity in Parents contribute to the diversification of that cultural identity in the unfinished historical process of producing and reproducing the “narratives of the past” by which and within which Asian-American identity is positioned (225). By adding layers of detail to the image of who an Asian-American is, Master of None therefore provides a reference point whence Asian-American cultural identity may be articulated. The presentation of difference within the cultural picture of a people group is vital to the quest to “constitute [them] as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable [them] to discover places from which to speak” (237). It is exactly the problems of the opposite — either a lack of representation, or representations characterised exclusively by similarity — that Dev confronts in Indians on TV.

Indians on TV

Indians on TV opens with a flashback to the 1990s and a young Dev watching Short Circuit 2, a movie about a robot lost in New York who befriends an Indian scientist called Benjamin Jahrvi, played by Fisher Stevens, a white American (Murthi, 2015). Young Dev changes channels and through his eyes the audience bears witness to a litany of similarly problematic representations of Indians in popular culture including examples from advertising, video games, and movies, not limited to the ’80s and ’90s: the montage closes with Ashton Kutcher’s infamous donning of ‘brownface’ in a 2013 television advert for ‘Popchips’ (Murthi, 2015). The episode then lurches back to present day as Dev is launched into a complex negotiation of his own cultural identity after being asked, and refusing, to put on an Indian accent in the process of interviewing for a role of “unnamed cab driver” in a television programme. In conversation with the casting director — Lucy — Dev protests the tacit racism inherent in the argument that it would be ‘strange’ to represent the cab driver without an accent.

LUCY
You know, Ben Kingsley did an accent in Gandhi, and he won the Oscar for it, so
DEV
But he didn’t win the Oscar just for doing the accent. I mean, it wasn’t an Oscar for Best Indian Accent. Also, might be strange to play Gandhi and talk like I’m talking now.
LUCY
I would argue that the same could be said of this cab driver.
DEV
I would argue that that's kind of a weird argument to make.

As well as the obvious problems with lazily comparing any role to be played by an Indian or Indian-American actor to a big screen representation of Gandhi, Lucy’s request, and the discourse it produces amongst the other characters to surround Dev in Indians on TV returns Master of None to the cultural signifier of accent. As Shilpa Davé argues, accents are by definition “inherently comparative” (2013: 3): they accentuate and highlight difference and invite their user to be viewed as ‘Other’. However as a singular point of difference, accents can become a homogenising feature of representation, against which Indians on TV portrays Dev reacting. In bemoaning the sameness of the roles available to him, Dev is not simply seeking variety of representation, but more fundamentally a rupture of the way in which representations of Indian-American cultural identity are seemingly bound to a fixed structure of meaning. Stuart Hall borrows Jacques Derrida’s hybrid term differance, which takes the basic meaning of the verb ‘to differ’ and influences it with the notion of ‘to defer’ (1990: 229). This alternative account of difference suggests the capacity of heterodox representation to disrupt the fixity of meaning by challenging its assumptions, that Indian-Americans speak with the same accent for example, thus deferring the possibility of a “finished or completed” structure — of language in Derrida’s case, or of cultural identity for Hall (1990: 229).

After the audition Dev is having coffee with Ravi — who did put on an accent in his audition for the same part — and laments the lack of non-stereotypical roles that are available to them as Indian-American actors: “There probably is a Pradeep who runs a convenience store, and I have nothing against him, but why can’t there be a Pradeep just once who’s, like, an architect, or he designs mittens or does one of the jobs Bradley Cooper’s characters do in movies?”. Ravi’s response is conflicted, and sets up the uniqueness of the episode as a representation of Indian-American characters battling issues of misrepresentation. “Dude, I think about that too. I just can’t wait for that. I got to work. And, look, in the meantime, I can do good things with this Pradeep money. I mean, I can go donate money to charity. I can buy cool clothes.” After the two friends audition for a new sitcom called Three Buddies, the episode further complicates its portrayal of representation by having Dev receive an accidentally forwarded email communication from Jerry Danvers, the executive in charge of the show, which includes the phrase: “I like them both but there can’t be two”, as well as the unquestionably racist “let’s meet them both and see who can curry our favor, hahaha.”

With the emails as leverage, Dev ponders leaking to the press, whilst the executive in question attempts to smooth him over with court-side seats at a basketball game. During the game Dev meets rapper Busta Rhymes, an associate of Danvers, who encourages Dev to use the emails as leverage, not to leak to the press but instead to secure the opportunity the part in the show presents — a major role in a big sitcom without an accent — even if it’s by way of an executive’s private racism” (Murthi, 2015). “Don’t play the race card; charge it to the race card,” in Rhymes’ words. In having Dev receive this perspective from a successful black rapper, further reinforced by his agent Shannon — a black woman at the top of her career, Indians on TV conveys a representation of the pressures on minorities to compromise their principles for the sake of their careers or other pragmatic ambitions. Ultimately, Dev contradicts himself multiple times as the evolving situation makes his abandonment of his initial principled stand more or less likely to land him the part: all the complexity of representation itself is here made a part of the way Master of None presents the historical experience of Indian-Americans. Indians on TV does not however, pour shame or reproach on Dev for his conflicted attempt “to navigate a world that insouciantly marginalises [his] existence” (Murthi, 2015). Its representation thus reproduces Indian-American cultural identity as almost necessarily afflicted with the struggle to negotiate said world: to be Indian-American is to be legitimately torn between principles and pragmatism.

To Conclude…

At one point in Indians on TV, Dev says “there’s more Indians popping up every now and then, but we’re like set decoration. We’re not the ones doing the main stuff. We’re not fucking the girls and all that stuff. We’re just not there yet. There can be one, but there can’t be two, you know?” It would be high enough praise of Master of None to recognise the clever irony of this statement within a show which puts an Indian-American leading character in a “standard ‘everyman’ role”, which indeed also portrays him having sex, and shows him often alongside other Indian-American characters as well as characters of other minority groups. With the additional lens of Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural identity it is possible to further laud the show for consciously implicating its “position[s] of enunciation”(1990: 222).

The above statement delivered by an Indian-American actor ‘doing the main stuff’ by portraying an Indian-American character who wishes that Indian-American actors could do ‘the main stuff’ bears witness to Hall’s assertion that “who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place” (1990: 222). There are any number of other ways in which Master of None constitutes a representation within which Indian-American cultural identity is formed, let alone other forms of identity. The testimony of those who identify with this cultural identity is perhaps the most instructive evidence. Vikram Murthi states that he had never before “seen three Indian Americans on screen at the same time speak without accents, let alone an Indian American character have sex with a white character on TV” (2015).

Finally, returning to the existential tone with which the essay began, just as its main character seeks to live not by any external definition of who he is or pre-existing expectations of who he should be, but to define himself subsequent to his chosen course of existence, Master of None may be considered, through Hall’s account of cultural identity, a piece of culture — a narrative — within and from which cultural identities as a ‘positioning to the past’ may be produced. Hall allows Master of None to be viewed “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” (1990: 236–237).

References

Alex Jung, E. (2015). 2015: The Year Asian-Americans Finally Got a Shot on TV. http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/asian-americans-on-tv-2015.html

Davé, S. (2013). Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press

Hall, S. (1990). ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. In: J. Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Huang, F. (2016). The Stories We Tell: Asian Americans on TV and Policy Down the Road. http://reappropriate.co/2016/02/the-stories-we-tell-asian-americans-on-tv-and-policy-down-the-road/#more-10303

Manansala, A. (2016). Representation, Identity, and Allyship in Fresh off the Boat and Master of None. http://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2016/01/representation-identity-and-allyship-fresh-boat-and-master-none

Murthi, V. (2015). Indians on TV: How Aziz Ansari and ‘Master of None’ Navigate the Anxieties of Representation. http://www.indiewire.com/2015/11/indians-on-tv-how-aziz-ansari-and-master-of-none-navigate-the-anxieties-of-representation-129132/

Plath, S. (1971). The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row

Poniewozik, J. (2015). Review: Aziz Ansari, in ‘Master of None,’ Negotiates Technology and Social Mores. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/arts/television/review-aziz-ansari-in-master-of-none-negotiates-technology-and-social-mores.html?_r=0

Sartre, J.-P. (1945). Existentialism is a Humanism.

Shetty, S. (2015). Charge It to the Race Card. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/11/race_in_master_of_none_with_aziz_ansari_the_netflix_show_s_depiction_of.html

Sreedharan, G. (2016). The importance of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/4Jt7GCKvrVE60h3q6VlpLJ/The-importance-of-Master-of-None.html

*This is the actual title of episode 8.