Catalog-ing ethnicity

Abstract

Several cultural studies commentators have noted the processes by which the transnationalization of corporate identity has also come to signal paradoxically an increasing process of global localization. This article explores the complex articulations of the global/local as they are played out in the everyday, existential dilemma of clothing matters for immigrants. It examines the relationship of clothing to questions of cultural citizenship in the US, and remarks on the reinscription of ethnicity as part of a similar though different nationalizing process in India. The study argues that such fetishization of cultural identities is deeply embedded within the consumerist and capitalist politics that seeks to commodify such identities. It examines the paradoxes of this dialectical movement by looking at how mail order catalogs in the US market ‘ethnicity’ as a sign of a non-contestatory process of ‘Americanization’ to a public increasingly desirous of consuming an ethnicity that can also be relinquished at w...