Imagining India: The Nation as a Brand

This thesis critically analyzes the phenomenon of nation branding as a technique of neocolonial governmentality. The study focuses on Brand India - postcolonial India’s attempt to imagine the nation and its people through the discourse of branding. I argue that India’s nation branding exercise holl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mehta-Karia, Sheetal
Other Authors: Delhi, Kari
Language:en_ca
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1807/30097
Description
Summary:This thesis critically analyzes the phenomenon of nation branding as a technique of neocolonial governmentality. The study focuses on Brand India - 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 thesis 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