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Imagining India: The nation as a brand
- Source: Studies in South Asian Film & Media, Volume 4, Issue 1, Apr 2012, p. 7 - 21
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- 01 Apr 2012
Abstract
This article critically analyses the phenomenon of nation branding as a technique of neocolonial governmentality. I focus on the ‘India Everywhere’ campaign that launched Brand India at the 2006 World Economic Forum to highlight postcolonial India’s attempt to imagine the nation and its people through the discourse of branding. I argue that India’s nation branding exercise hollows out the postcolonial imagination so that the nation can now only be imagined through a language and within a framework ‘always-already’ constituted for the postcolony. This article builds on Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and utilizes a postcolonial framework to show that when the practice of nation branding is applied to a postcolonial nation it works to reinscribe the colonial legacy and reaffirm colonial power relations.