Liberalization's Children

Lukose Ritty A. Lukose

Description

Liberalization's Children explores how youth and gender have become crucial sites for a contested cultural politics of globalization in India. Popular discourses draw a contrast between "midnight's children," who were rooted in post-independence Nehruvian developmentalism, and "liberalization's children," who are global in outlook and unapologetically consumerist. Moral panics about beauty pageants and the celebration of St. Valentine's Day reflect ambivalence about the impact of an expanding commodity culture, especially on young women. By simply highlighting the triumph of consumerism, such discourses obscure more than they reveal. Through a careful analysis of "consumer citizenship," Ritty A. Lukose argues that the breakdown of the Nehruvian vision connects with ongoing struggles over the meanings of public life and the cultural politics of belonging. Those struggles play out in the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism; reconfigurations of youthful, middle-class femininity; attempts by the middle class to alter understandings of citizenship; and assertions of new forms of masculinity by members of lower castes.Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Consumerism
• Globalization
• India
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822391241
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Liberalization’s Children

Liberalization’s Children

Gender, Youth,

and Consumer Citizenship

in Globalizing India

r i t t y a . l u ko s e

Duke University Press≤Durham&London≤≠≠Ω

∫≤≠≠Ω duke university press all rights reserved printed in the united states of america on acid-free paper$ designed by katy clove typeset in quadraat by keystone typesetting, inc. library of congress cataloging-in-publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

For my parents— aleyammaand pattiyalmepurath lukose

contents

Acknowledgments .................................................................................... ix

introduction Liberalization’s Children—Nation, Generation, and Globalization .................∞

∞Locating Kerala, Between Development and Globalization .......................≤≥

≤Fashioning Gender and Consumption ....................................................∑∂

≥Romancing the Public ...........................................................................Ω∏

∂Politics, Privatization, and Citizenship ..................................................∞≥≤

∑Education, Caste, and the Secular .........................................................∞∏≥

epilogue Consumer Citizenship in the Era of Globalization .....................................≤≠≠

Notes ....................................................................................................≤≠π

Bibliography ..........................................................................................≤≥Ω

Index .....................................................................................................≤∏∑

acknowledgments

This book has been a long journey and therefore has accumulated many debts. While it is impossible to thank all those that have helped to make it possible, I will mention a few here. The research for this book has been generously supported by the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright- Hays Fellowship Program, the National Academy of Education Postdoc- toral Fellowship, a grant from the University Research Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, and The Trustee’s Council of Penn Women Summer Research Award from the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania. The writing of this book has also been supported by the Spencer Foundation. I have been greatly helped during the writing process by Kathy Chetko- vich, Karen Seriguchi, Laura Helper-Ferris, and Ken Wissoker. I am deeply indebted to N. Shasidaran and the S.N. Trust for initially facilitating this research and to all the students, teachers, and adminis- trators who so warmly and generously gave of themselves and their time. Many of the students and my hostelmates have become good friends over