Hard Kaur: Broadcasting the new Desi woman

In the last 20 years hip hop has become an important site of identity construction for South Asian diasporic youth (Nair & Balaji, 2008; Huq, 2006; Sharma, 2010). In this article I examine the mediatized personae of Indian born and British raised recording artist Hard Kaur, who claims to be the first ‘Desi’ female rapper. As Hard Kaur’s music, music videos, and interviews travel to and are now being produced in India, the race, gender, and class constructions formed during her experiences in the U.K. are finding their way to a youthful Indian public. I argue that an analysis of Hard Kaur’s mediatized interactions reveals the ways in which gendered norms are being contested and reaffirmed within a transnational imaginary

Waiting Subjects: Social Media–Inspired Self-Portraits as Gallery Exhibition in Delhi, India

In this article I reflect on a gallery exhibition of self-portraits by young Somali refugees. These images were selected from a collection of digital photographs that were shot while producing a collaborative ethnographic film project on the racialization of African nationals in Delhi, India. The images that my youthful interlocutors produced while shooting for our collaborative film project, however, were not originally intended for display but were an extension of their already prolific visual and textual self-documentation on social media. Utilizing select images and texts from the exhibition we culled from this ‘accidental’ photographic archive to evoke what it means for these young Somalis to wait for asylum in Europe or North America while they make their lives in India, I argue for an attention to the digital image-making practices of young people as a site where subjectivities are self-fashioned and ethnographic insights emerge