Aesthetic Citizenship: Popular Culture, Migrant Youth, and the Making of \u27World Class\u27 Delhi

Delhi has nearly doubled in population since the early 1990s due to in-migration (censusindia.gov, 2011). These migrants, like migrants around the world, strive to adapt to their new surroundings by producing themselves in ways which make them socially, economically, and politically viable. My project examines how recent international and intranational immigrant youth who have come to Delhi to partake in its economic possibilities and, in some cases, to escape political uncertainty, are utilizing globally circulating popular cultural forms to make themselves visible in a moment when the city strives to recast its image as a world class destination for roaming capital (Roy, 2011). I focus on two super diverse settlement communities in South Delhi to explore the citizenship making claims of immigrant youth who, to date, have been virtually invisible in academic and popular narratives of the city. Specifically, I follow three groups of ethnically diverse migrant youth from these two settlement communities as they engage with hip hop, a popular cultural form originating in Black American communities in the 1970s (Chang, 2006; Morgan, 2009; Rose, 1994). As hip hop\u27s music and its practices gain popularity amongst youth in Delhi from across a wide spectrum of class and ethnic positions, I trace how these migrant youth utilize its styles and globally reaching networks coupled with inexpensive digital capture technology to fashion themselves and their settlement communities as part of a world class urbanity in the making.

Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India

In this article we show how subject positions are assumed when hip hop is used by institutions supported by western nation-states as a ‘cultural intervention’ in the global south. Focusing on the Indo-German Hip Hop & Urban Art Project 2011–2012, a hip hop educational project sited in several cities in India and sponsored by cultural institutions funded by the German State, we study how actors negotiate between what we identify as a discourse of hip hop authenticity and a discourse of internationalization. Employing a theory of scales allows us to investigate how actors on the ground engage in the semiotic play of repositioning of and in historically situated notions of authenticity and pedagogy. We argue that the findings have implications for future applied and theoretical work on the internationalization of hip hop as an educational and diplomatic endeavor

Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India. 36(1): 55-64.

In this article we show how subject positions are assumed when hip hop is used by institutions supported by western nation-states as a ‘cultural intervention’ in the global south. Focusing on the Indo-German Hip Hop & Urban Art Project 2011–2012, a hip hop educational project sited in several cities in India and sponsored by cultural institutions funded by the German State, we study how actors negotiate between what we identify as a discourse of hip hop authenticity and a discourse of internationalization. Employing a theory of scales allows us to investigate how actors on the ground engage in the semiotic play of repositioning of and in historically situated notions of authenticity and pedagogy. We argue that the findings have implications for future applied and theoretical work on the internationalization of hip hop as an educational and diplomatic endeavor

Introduction: Multimodal Anthropology and the Politics of Invention

This essay and the articles included in this special issue theorize the possibilities – and pitfalls – that emerge as anthropologists utilise a combination of audio, video, text, still images, performance methodologies, and web platforms to iteratively, collaboratively, and sensually generate relations with research participants, interdisciplinary colleagues and beyond. We are not necessarily interested in developing multimedia approaches to representing or disseminating anthropological knowledge – rather, we are concerned with how multimodality may contribute to a politics of invention for the discipline. We argue that multimodality offers a line of flight for an anthropology yet to come: multi-sensorial rather than text-based, performative rather than representational, and inventive rather than descriptive. This reimagined anthropology requires a move away from established forms of authorship, representation and academic publishing towards projects that experiment with unanticipated forms, collaborations, audiences and correspondences – including questioning what the open in Open Access should signify, as Anand Pandian (2018) has compellingly argued. As importantly, a focus on multimodality and invention invites a reconsideration of the pedagogy of anthropology – both in the sense of what gets formally taught within the disciplinary canon, and in relation to the manifold ways of teaching and learning together that emerge during fieldwork, not always made visible, and which exceed the textual and conceptual domain. Indeed, we use multimodality and invention to refer to the multiple ways of doing ethnography - and the resulting multiple anthropologies - that create ways of knowing and learning together differently. In the essay that follows we offer several provocations that multimodality and invention produce with regards to pedagogy, publication, and collaboration – which are picked up in novel ways in each of the articles included as part of this collection. Our essay is not meant as an enclosure, or a boundary, but rather a framing – that is, a point of view or an orientation to the multiple questions that emerge in each of the essays, where the respective anthropologists rethink engagement, form, and purpose in their ethnographic endeavours. We draw from John Jackson Jr. to argue that framing is at once “a gesture toward contextualization (a conceptual framing of the relevant issues) and a singular impression captured in time (as in the presentation of a framed painting or the relative irreducibility of a film or video still)”. Taking Jackson Jr.’s second point to heart, we offer this introductory essay as a still image by which to see with and through the ethnographic engagements of others. In this still image, the concepts of multimodality and invention are unpacked and interrogated in ways we hope offer an alternative way to think about ethnography and anthropological theory in a moment where the discipline is grappling with how to find ways to engage more effectively with the increasingly fractured and precarious worlds we inhabit

Desiring Bollywood: Re-staging racism, exploring difference

In this article I engage with the insights that emerged through the making of Desiring Bollywood, a collaborative ethno-fiction project I produced in 2018. The project recruited academics, amateur actors, novice filmmakers, and enthusiastic university students to narrate the story of Jason, an aspiring actor and filmmaker from Nigeria who I first met in 2013 soon after his release from Tihar Prison in Delhi, India. My goals are two-fold: first, to share a few scenes from the film – embedded in this article as video clips – to broadly theorize the affordances and limits of what I call re-staging, the collaborative, performance-based multimodal method we devised and deployed to produce Desiring Bollywood. Second, and more central to the article, I aim to analyze these very same scenes to show how re-staging, as it offered participants involved in the project the opportunity to reflexively explore how Jason’s experiences of discrimination in Delhi and the aspirations and desires that led him there in the first place, create a rich site of analysis to engage with the nuances of anti-Black racism in India in a moment where ‘India-Africa’ economic relationships are on the rise. RESUMEN En este artículo examino el entendimiento que surgió a través de la producción de Desiring Bollywood, un proyecto colaborativo de etno-ficción que realicé en 2018. El proyecto reclutó académicos, actores amateurs, productores cinematográficos novicios y entusiastas estudiantes universitarios para narrar la historia de Jason, un aspirante a actor y productor cinematográfico, de Nigeria a quien conocí en 2013, poco después de su puesta en libertad de la Prisión Tihar en Delhi, India. Mi propósito es doble: primero, compartir algunas escenas del filme – embebidas en este artículo como video clips– para teorizar ampliamente las affordances y límites de lo que llamo remontaje, el colaborativo método multimodal basado en performance, que nosotros ideamos y utilizamos para producir Desiring Bollywood. Segundo, y más central al artículo, tengo como objetivo analizar estas mismas escenas para mostrar cómo el remontaje, en la medida que ofreció a los participantes involucrados en el proyecto la oportunidad de explorar reflexivamente cómo las experiencias de Jason de discriminación en Delhi y las aspiraciones y deseos que lo llevaron allí en primer lugar, crea un sitio profundo de análisis para abordar los matices del racismo anti-negro en India en un momento donde las relaciones económicas “India-África” están en aumento

Ciphers, ‘hoods and digital DIY studios in India: Negotiating aspirational individuality and hip hop collectivity

This article argues for an attention to the DIY digital studio as a key site where aspiring hip hop MCs in the contemporary moment negotiate between their desire for individual success and their commitments to various forms of local belonging, not least which includes staying true to a hip hop ethos of collectivity. We follow Sonal, a b-boy and MC we worked with in a studio that we set up in Delhi, India in 2013 to work with aspiring MCs in the city’s scene. We trace his subsequent rise to fame in India to argue for an attention to the DIY studio as the material and metaphoric realization of the digital infrastructures of global capitalism. The studio manifests economic and social opportunities for young men like Sonal in Delhi, and, we suspect, for young people across the world who now have access to social media and inexpensive production hardware and software. Yet, in creating opportunities for individual economic and social uplift, the studio poses a threat to the ideal of a hip hop community that undergirds its possibility even as it opens up opportunities to enunciate commitments to other forms of belonging

Diasporic Sincerity: Tales from a 'returnee' researcher

This paper explores how my diasporic 'returnee’ status positions me with the participants in my research endeavors within education reform NGOs in and around Bangalore, India. I argue that in addition to forcing me to reassess the scripts of ‘belonging' I hold as an Indian American, the very stories that make me part of the diaspora reshape the research context by offering my interlocutors new narrative tropes by which to (re)imagine India. These re-imaginings precipitate a destabilization of context specific categories that limit social interaction, such as caste, class, gender and regional belonging, allowing me the possibility of ethnographically sincere encounters across a diverse set of participants (Jackson, 2010). However, as I persistently transgress boundaries I find myself in vulnerable positions, as the politics of difference within the organization threaten to undermine my research endeavor