Thus there might be the temptation to see these mandates as a causal factor in the show’s genesis, but to do so would be short-sighted. Instead, in my interviews with Zarqa Nawaz (the show’s creator), Mary Darling (one of its executive producers at Westwind Pictures), and Anton Leo (the former CBC executive who advocated that the show be green-lit), people told me that they were responding to a much more complex web of relationships: the one between non-Muslims and Muslims in North America, the one between majority and minority (or “mainstream” and “multicultural”) Canadians, and the one between viewers and the various members of the television industry. To be sure, these relationships overlapped and shaped each other: the relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims was influenced, for example, by the relationship between majority and minority Canadians, although it was in many ways distinct.

The various people involved in Little Mosque’s production were positioned differently in the communities between which they were mediating, and as a consequence, the factors that influenced their creative decisions differed, too. The factors shaping Zarqa Nawaz’s creation of Little Mosque were both intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics). Nawaz was concerned about the growing conservatism of Canadian mosques due, as she saw it, to the influx of imams trained outside of Canada. Her identity as a Muslim and her convictions as a feminist provided an initial impulse, which was shaped in turn by factors deriving from global geopolitical events as well as her experience in Canada’s broadcasting and film industries.

Little Mosque creator Zarqa Nawaz.

The factors influencing Little Mosque’s executive producers, Mary Darling and Clark Donnelly of Westwind Pictures, were also intrinsic (related to identity) and extrinsic (related to global geopolitics and the Canadian television industry). As with Nawaz, questions of religious identity played an important role in the decision by Darling and Donnelly to produce the show. Darling and Donnelly are Bahá’í, holding unity across religion and race as a central value, and their faith plays a central role in their decisions about which shows to produce. Like Nawaz, they were concerned about the growing mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, their decisions were also shaped by their assessment of a show’s potential for success and their ability to secure funds for its production.

For Anton Leo, the creative head of CBC television comedy in the mid-2000s, extrinsic factors (the CBC’s regional and multicultural mandates) outweighed intrinsic factors (identity). Leo was well aware, of course, of the CBC’s multicultural and regional mandates, but for him, the question of those mandates was inflected through – and gained its relevance from – that of identity. He thought that Little Mosque had promise because it told a universal story, that of the immigrant experience, in a country where everyone (except, of course, for First Nations) came originally from someplace else. Multicultural programming, in his view, was programming to which a country of immigrants could relate.

There are many interesting things to note about how the people responsible for Little Mosque understood their relationships to the communities between which they were mediating. One is worth noting here: for Nawaz and Darling, the show was about religion, or even more to the point, about belief. For Leo, it was about culture. This difference shaped Little Mosque’s evolution, in conjunction with other features of the program that resulted in a complex show with multiple contradictory interpretations and meanings, as I describe in my next entry.

These days, New York Life, Metlife, Nationwide and State Farm, leading American insurance and financial investment companies, are all over Star Plus, an Indian satellite channel that is available on Dish and DirecTV in the US. The advertisements featuring these companies fall into the “culturally sensitive” category of marketing strategy. While the discourse of “ethnic” niches has been getting stronger in the fields of business and marketing since the 1990s, much of that attention was devoted to targeting black and Hispanic markets. Since the 2000s, however, the “premium” Asian American consumer has figured prominently in advertising discourse. The 2000 Census Report coupled with marketing surveys have helped generate the idea that Asian Americans not only represent a rapidly growing market in terms of numbers and buying power; they are also increasingly diverse in terms of their consumer choices. Not surprising, then, that in the first part of this decade, the turn towards multicultural advertising involved actively going after consumer groups such as Indian Americans.

Starting with Indian American print and online spaces, New York Life, Metlife, State Farm and Nationwide, which have been placing their ads on Indian American print and online media, now seem to be invested in Indian satellite television channels. While so far I have seen their English and Hindi language ads, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more in other Indian languages. Coming to the content of the ads themselves, tropes of home, family life, traditional festivals, pastoral village life, and hybrid Indian American lifestyles are liberally used to generate the message that Indian Americans with all their “difference” are understood and welcome here in America. While some advertisements leave little room for subtlety (like producing an “untouched India” motif with elephants, village life, and pastoral lifestyles to say something profound about tradition), there are others that are open to multiple readings and some which resist stereotypical representation. Another interesting feature is that sometimes the ads function as an invitation to enter the labor force of these firms by joining as agents; a common strategy seems to be using “real” agents, who are Indian American, and weaving a narrative of success, trust, and security through them.

My sense is that there is a lot going on with these neo-multicultural strategies of advertising that cannot be read only in terms of commodification and stereotyping, although they certainly persist. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s critique of corporate managed forms of Benetton-pluralism is certainly relevant to the branding of the premium Asian American consumer. At the same time, if we think of these efforts by “American” entities to access “Indian American” spaces of culture, capital labor, and belonging as symptomatic of emergent modalities of the transnational, might we be able to see subtle shifts in the discourse of multiculturalism in the contemporary moment? In other words, it is certainly problematic when companies are framing their approach along the lines of “ethnic segmentation.” But then again, when their cultural production of the “ethnicity” of their target audience involves mediating discourses of travel, mobility, transnational lifestyles, and popular cultures, does that resignify the meaning of “cultural difference” in a way that resists fixing? I am not entirely sure, but I think it is an idea worth pursuing. I hope to make my next entry more about the ads themselves so that some of these ideas can be revisited.