Globally familiar digital hip hop, masculinity, and urban space in Delhi

"THE GLOBALLY FAMILIAR is a ethnographic study following young men in Delhi's hip hop scene from a variety of class, caste, geographic, and cultural-linguistic backgrounds as they construct themselves through their online and offline aesthetic practices. A synthetic term, the globally familiar is used to describe and theorize how digital platforms offer these young men the means to reimagine and remake self and city through hip hop practice. Recognizing the reach of American Black masculinity beyond the African diaspora, digital hip hop becomes the lens by which these young men come to understand and creatively mobilize their perceived and experienced gendered (classed, and racialized) difference in ways that produce new relations in and with the city they call home. The book is divided into six chapters that structure the analysis of the globally familiar into its composite thematic parts: relational, consumptive, material, global, spatial, and racial. Chapter 1 discusses how intimate relationships and friendships are constituted across difference through digital hip hop practice. Chapter 2 focuses on the consumption of sartorial accouterments, or swag, and its transformative capacity to offer a connection to an embodied American Black masculinity. Chapter 3 investigates the audio-visual material production of hip hop and its circulation in digital realms, and its relation to immaterial labor. Chapter 4 looks at the complex political economy of returning Indian diasporic hip hop emissaries, and how they seek to capitalize on the creative endeavors of the young men in Delhi's hip hop scene, offering these young men material and symbolic incentives to collaborate with them. Chapter 5 situates the case by artists and activists for an alternate development model for the urban village, represented as a global 'hood, against modern urban change in Delhi. Chapter 6 engages with the ways racism is evoked and experienced by a broad array of young male practitioners in the city, and the ways in which the globally familiar of race - vis-à-vis media accounts of systemic discrimination and popular resistances to them elsewhere--becomes a site of solidarity and creative production in Delhi, even as it also becomes a locus of fracture and impossibility"