The Mindy Kaling Cinematic Universe

Every brown person has an opinion on Mindy Kaling. For some, she’s a trailblazer for representation — the only woman of color writer on The Office, the first woman of color with her own primetime sitcom. As Kaling said herself in 2015, when asked why there weren’t more women of color on The Mindy Project: “I’m a f*cking Indian woman with her own f*cking network show.” For others, she embodies and broadcasts the most annoying aspects of South Asian America — disconnection to her roots, political ambivalence towards casteism and other diaspora politics, ‘unlikeable’ female characters, and a vexing relationship to whiteness.

This course will use Kaling’s works to envision a contemporary theory of South Asian American racial formation, with watershed moments like the 1990s tech boom for “highly skilled” H1-B workers, 9/11, the Obama presidency and celebration of ‘multiculturalism,’ and the Trump election. We will use close-analysis of Kaling's cinematic works, including episodes of The Office, The Mindy Project, and Never Have I Ever, in conversation with other pop culture phenomenons like Indian Matchmaking, Ms. Marvel, and comedic works by Fatima Asghar, Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani, to track evolving narratives of South Asian America. Moving beyond the model minority myth, the course will explore South Asian Americans as agents of both progressive change and oppression, paying close attention to intersections of caste and religion within the diaspora.

Questions the course will engage with include: how do South Asian Americans situate themselves in the American racial landscape? Can we chart a recent intellectual historiography of diasporic debates about ‘representation?’ How are notions of race and identity imbricated in the production and reception of contemporary South Asian American storytelling? What is the role of pop culture in struggles against caste, race, and class oppression?