South Asian Literature, Arts, and Culture – serie

Manufacturing Indianness takes an interdisciplinary approach in deconstructing nation-branding exercises in neoliberal India, utilizing the fetish as a critical device to demonstrate how postcolonial nation-building can become colonizing. Using interviews with media-makers and nation-branding professionals, postcolonial theory, media and cultural studies, psychoanalytic theories, political economy approaches, affective theory, cultural geography, and branding and marketing perspectives, Manufacturing Indianness provides an insightful and academically sophisticated investigation into how the Indian state and its corporate partners have merged cultural/ethnic nationalism (Hindutva) with neoliberalism to form the ultimate fetish of Brand India.