In The Globally Familiar, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan presents a close reading of his ethnographic work to argue that young men in Delhi both consume and produce hip hop to create meaningful relationships across lines of difference and to imagine possibilities for their economic mobility, gendered subjectivity, and spatialized presence that would otherwise be unavailable to them, and in ways that “productively disrupted normative understandings of twenty-first-century Delhi's social order” (p. 6). Dattatreyan defines his central term, “the globally familiar,” as “a feeling of connectedness made possible through media-enabled participation and practice and the affective economy and structure of aspiration this feeling produces. It suggests that by cultivating the self through the consumption, production, and circulation of transnational popular culture, a different present and future, replete with unanticipated participation and opportunity, is possible” (p. 3). More specifically, the popular culture referenced through the globally familiar “is Black American masculinity as it is digitally broadcast, received, and retrofitted for rebroadcast through hip hop's sonic, visual, and kinesthetic sensibilities” (p. 4).
In tracing how the globally familiar shapes young men's performances of self, identity, and space in Delhi (and particularly in the urban village of Khirki), Dattatreyan addresses several key gaps in the literature. First, he provocatively and thoroughly demonstrates how hip hop has shaped “gendered subjectivities elsewhere” beyond the West, and in so doing, his research decenters the West in presenting previously unexplored instantiations of “global technoculture” (p. 4); second, he extends work in hip hop feminism by presenting a fully intersectional analysis of masculinity in the context of race, caste, class, ethnicity, and place; and third, he challenges the prevailing narrative in studies of India that “the cosmopolitan elite have access to the global while the masses do not” (p. 6).
The book's six chapters cover substantial ground in demonstrating how (1) hip hop practice shapes homosocial and heterosexual relationships among these young male artists; (2) the concept of “swag” and the process of consumption shape masculinized identities of difference through hip hop's sartorial style; (3) hip hop offers young men new opportunities for labor beyond the service industry, particularly based on a middle-class fetishization of hip hop performances as “affective commodities,” but also interrupts capitalist labor and consumption through an emphasis on open-ended play; (4) young men in Delhi's hip hop scene navigate the ideological battle between “hip hop emissaries” from America and Europe who import varying notions of hip hop as either “decolonial” (based on resistance and rooted in class position) or “universalist” (participatory and democratic) (p. 111); (5) hip hop practitioners serve ambivalent roles in programs of gentrification of the urban village that purport to serve them while also potentially leading to their exclusion; and (6) even while hip hop leads to friendships and economic opportunities across lines of difference, pervasive anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, as well as exclusionary notions of Indian-ness, continue to foreclose such opportunities for hip hop artists who immigrated to Delhi from Africa or from northeastern parts of India.
As a whole, the book productively engages with urban space, digital technoculture, and masculinity to present a nuanced picture of hip hop in Delhi's urban villages that resists the totalizing frames of the region (South Asia), nation (India), or even city (Delhi as a whole). Instead, Dattatreyan presents an impressively nuanced portrait of Delhi's individual neighborhoods, enclaves, and sub-enclaves, tracing the class, caste, race, gender, ethnic, and linguistic politics embedded in his interlocutors’ inhabiting and traversing of these spaces. One of his sub-arguments—the ethics of ethnography in a digital age when the “field” includes every interaction with digital and social media platforms—receives special treatment in the epilogue and presents an important and understudied debate in the discipline and methodology of anthropology.
However, Dattatreyan sometimes misses opportunities to draw in scholars of global hip hop in failing to discuss the politics of hip hop as his primary instantiation of the “globally familiar.” For example, Dattatreyan's definitions of this key term as both “a feeling of connectedness” (p. 3) and “Black American masculinity digitally broadcast” (p. 4) reflect a slippage that deserves further examination. In this sense, even the term “the globally familiar” feels a bit too capacious to be accurate, since there is a racial, national, and gendered politics involved in both what becomes “global” and what feels “familiar”; outside of the last chapter's consideration of African migrants’ awkward positionality vis-à-vis Delhi's hip hop scene, Dattatreyan does not fully acknowledge or explore the role of Blackness (and anti-Blackness) in these flows. Furthermore, while Dattatreyan provides very clear definitions of this key term in his introduction, the chapters themselves sometimes refer to “the globally familiar” in less clear ways, so that it is difficult to parse how the specific chapters illuminate or nuance this term. Finally, diacritics and/or more careful transcription of the Hindi speech and raps of these young hip hop artists would assist scholars of South Asia and provide more transparency, while captions on the images provided would help clarify their rhetorical purpose.
Overall, however, The Globally Familiar is an important work in providing an 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.
