Overview

In The Globally Familiar Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan traces how the rapid development of information and communication technologies in India has created opportunities for young people to creatively explore their gendered, classed, and racialized subjectivities in and through transnational media worlds. His ethnography focuses on a group of diverse young, working-class men in Delhi as they take up the African diasporic aesthetics and creative practices of hip hop. Dattatreyan shows how these aspiring b-boys, MCs, and graffiti writers fashion themselves and their city through their online and offline experimentations with hip hop, thereby accessing new social, economic, and political opportunities while acting as consumers, producers, and influencers in global circuits of capitalism. In so doing, Dattatreyan outlines how the hopeful, creative, and vitally embodied practices of hip hop offer an alternative narrative of urban place-making in ""digital"" India.

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9781478011200

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Reviews

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan has produced a wonderfully rich, nuanced narrative of Delhi's hip hop scene. Engaging with young men from India, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Nepal, The Globally Familiar is not only brilliantly and elegantly theorized but methodologically innovative and sophisticated. Combining the tradition of 'hiphopography' with digital production and participation, Dattatreyan's narrative not only bristles with insights about youth cultural production vis-a-vis race, masculinity, capitalism, and the global; it also pushes global hip hop studies to the next level by demonstrating the power of sustained commitment to both the culture and those who produce it. The Globally Familiar is a rare gem. -- H. Samy Alim, David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles A rich narrative of urban transformation told from the perspectives of young men in the margins of Delhi. This lucid ethnography illuminates how hip hop and digital media entangle cultural worlds and redefine classed masculinity. A riveting read with cross-disciplinary appeal, The Globally Familiar opens new perspectives about urbanity from below. -- Radha S. Hegde, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

A rich narrative of urban transformation told from the perspectives of young men on the margins of Delhi. This lucid ethnography illuminates how hip hop and digital media entangle cultural worlds and redefine classed masculinity. A riveting read with cross-disciplinary appeal, The Globally Familiar opens new perspectives about urbanity from below. -- Radha S. Hegde, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan has produced a wonderfully rich, nuanced narrative of Delhi's hip hop scene. Engaging with young men from India, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Nepal, The Globally Familiar is not only brilliantly and elegantly theorized but methodologically innovative and sophisticated. Combining the tradition of 'hiphopography' with digital production and participation, Dattatreyan's narrative not only bristles with insights about youth cultural production vis-a-vis race, masculinity, capitalism, and the global but also pushes global hip hop studies to the next level by demonstrating the power of sustained commitment to both the culture and those who produce it. The Globally Familiar is a rare gem. -- H. Samy Alim, David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles

A rich narrative of urban transformation told from the perspectives of young men on the margins of Delhi. This lucid ethnography illuminates how hip hop and digital media entangle cultural worlds and redefine classed masculinity. A riveting read with cross-disciplinary appeal, The Globally Familiar opens new perspectives about urbanity from below. -- Radha S. Hegde, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan has produced a wonderfully rich, nuanced narrative of Delhi's hip hop scene. Engaging with young men from India, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, and Nepal, The Globally Familiar is not only brilliantly and elegantly theorized but methodologically innovative and sophisticated. Combining the tradition of 'hiphopography' with digital production and participation, Dattatreyan's narrative not only bristles with insights about youth cultural production vis-a-vis race, masculinity, capitalism, and the global but also pushes global hip hop studies to the next level by demonstrating the power of sustained commitment to both the culture and those who produce it. The Globally Familiar is a rare gem. -- H. Samy Alim, David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles The Globally Familiar convincingly argues that migrant working class young men's performance of hip hop's sonic, visual and kinemic aesthetics enables them to reimagine and remake the self and the city.... The book makes a stunning contribution to the burgeoning research on digital cultures, globalization, South Asian urban neighbourhoods and masculinity. -- Anjali Gera Roy * Popular Music * I am thrilled to learn from and teach this ethnography. With The Globally Familiar, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan has blown up the stage of the normative anthropological and cultural studies understanding of popular culture, India, urban aesthetics, subaltern life, global connections, and hip-hop. -- Stanley Thangaraj * Current Anthropology * The Delhi that emerges from Dattatreyan's richly textured writing is like a contact zone or a borderland; a contested, unequal, but not unimaginable or unimaginative urban space.... A concept like the globally familiar allows for a complex understanding of how globalization transforms our cities from below. -- Jaspal Naveel Singh * AAG Review of Books * In The Globally Familiar, Gabriel Dattatreyan presents an intimate, complex, and ultimately hopeful ethnography of the hip hop scene in Delhi, India, capturing how hip hop's meaning comes to be contested in its global circulation and uptake by young men in Delhi. -- Amanda Weidman * Journal of Anthropological Research * The Globally Familiar is an important work in providing a fully intersectional ethnography of the hip hop subculture in Delhi. This book has broad implications for helping us understand global hip hop outside of the West, as well as the globality of cultural activity in India outside of the elite. -- Sara Hakeem Grewal * Journal of Asian Studies *

Author Information

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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