Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India

In much popular discourse, a short-hand way to mark the advent and impact of globalization is to point to the evidence of global youth consuming practices and symbols in often remote corners of the world: during the 1990s, for example, the popularity of the basketball star Michael Jordan and his team the Chicago Bulls in the slums of Brazil and in rural villages in Africa, the spread of hip-hop music around the world, and the popularity of McDonalds among young people in China. These examples have a theory of globalization and youth embedded within them. Youth is seen as a consuming social group, the first to bend to what is understood to be the homogenizing pressures of globalization, a globalization fundamentally tied to Americanization. Youth consumption practices become an index of the presence and reach of globalization

Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the Era of Globalization

Globalization is often indexed by the rise of a consumerist ethos and the expansion of the market economy at the expense of state-centric formulations of politics and citizenship. This article explores the politics and practices of gendered democratic citizenship in an educational setting when that setting is newly reconfigured as a commodity under neoliberal privatization efforts. This entails an attention to discourses of consumption as they intersect postcolonial cultural-ideological political fields. Focusing on the contemporary trajectory among politicized male college students of a historically important masculinist political public in Kerala, India, the article tracks an explicit discourse of politics (rashtriyam). This enables an exploration of a struggle over the meaning of democratic citizenship that opposes a political public rooted in a tradition of anticolonial struggle and postcolonial nationalist politics to that of a civic public, rooted in ideas about the freedom to consume through the logic of privatization

Locating the transnational : gender and neoliberalism in the Kerala model of development

What politics of location animates transnational enquiry? What theoretical and methodological tools might an anthropology of transnationalism offer debates about gender and neoliberalism? Through an exploration of how the “Kerala Model of Development”, a consolidated discourse about gender and development within a “model” development state in India, entered a “global” arena starting in the 1970s, this presentation will draw out questions of theory and method that animate transnational frames of analysis. About speaker: Prof. Ritty Lukose, New York University With a background in anthropology, Ritty Lukose is currently interested in the relationship between Western, global and non-Western feminisms. Her book, Liberalization\u27s Children: Gender, Youth and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India, was published by Duke University Press in 2009 and co-published in India by Orient Blackswan in 2010. A co-edited book, South Asian Feminisms was published by Duke University Press (2012) and Zubaan, a leading feminist press in India. She teaches courses on globalization, India/South Asia, sex/gender and feminisms within global contexts, and ethnography