The Rhythm of Ambition
The Rhythm of Ambition
Power Temporalities and the Production of the Call Center Agent in Documentary Film and Reality Television
This chapter shows how documentaries help westerners overcome their anxieties about globalization and outsourcing. They do so by featuring a white male narrator who visits, describes, and then leaves the lowly social conditions of Indian subjects (especially Indian women), while highlighting the Indian subjects' negotiation between their premodern realities and ideologies and the neoliberal present. The documentaries also position Indian transnational subjects as inferior to western U.S. viewers through time/space ambivalences that, in an attempt to conceal anxieties about the changing landscape of transnational employment, thereby acknowledge and then protect U.S. workers from worries over the loss of their jobs at home.
Keywords: documentaries, globalization, outsourcing, neoliberalism, Indian transnational subjects, transnational employment
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