The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi

In The Globally Familiar Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan traces how the rapid development of information and communication technologies in India have 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—as they fashion themselves and their city as familiar through their online and offline experimentations with hip hop—access 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.