ABSTRACT
In 2010, NBC announced the premiere of a situation comedy called Outsourced to anchor their successful Thursday night back-to-back lineup of Community, 30 Rock, and The Office. Outsourced provides a cast of Indian sidekicks to one central White American male character and thereby repositions the call center narrative as one filled with individuals, rather than a group who are a faceless threat to American workers. The utilization of accent outside of the United States continues to homogenize South Asians and Indians as an acceptable form of difference that privileges American culture overseas. The narrative presented in Outsourced allows an examination of the way that racial hierarchies are not necessarily based simply on physical characteristics, but also through the cultural communication and deployment of accent that are so vital to the creation of American hierarchies of power and privilege.
