Branding ‘Perfection’

Abstract

This article examines notions of fake and real vis-a-vis East Indians’ interactions with American brand names, which provide particular insights into how they define themselves in relation to the ‘foreign’. It considers how this claiming of the foreign allows for a notion of personhood which relies on outward migration or how people imagine themselves as being somewhere else. Belonging has to be understood in relation to another place, the locus of which in contemporary Caribbean has come to mean North America. It is how the American brand explicates an idea of perfection that in turn illustrates how East Indians in Guyana and New York relate with the foreign as self and the self as other to complete a sense of who they are. The notion of the fake indexes these relations in terms of both ‘real brands’ and ‘real lives’, which find different meanings in the shifting landscape of the foreign.