Thinking the Globally Familiar in Hip Hop and Beyond: A Conversation with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan
Tara Giangrande
In this conversation, conducted via written exchange, Borderlines member Tara Giangrande speaks with Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan about his recent book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi (2020). Their conversation focuses on the development of Dattatreyan’s theoretical framework, reciprocity in ethnographic research, and questions of race and caste.
Tara: So the central conceptual framing you develop throughout this book is that of the “globally familiar.” I was struck by the capaciousness with which you describe and deploy this concept throughout the text. On page 3 you write,
“The globally familiar, broadly speaking, is the technological infrastructure that facilitates connection across place and time as well as the diversity of media these technologies can be made to conjure…Perhaps more importantly, the globally familiar is a feeling of connectedness made possible through media-enabled participation and practice and the affective economy and structure of aspiration this feeling produces.”
So here, already, the globally familiar encompasses so much—infrastructures, media, economies and structures of affect and aspiration. And then, on page 13, you write,
“The globally familiar, when theorized as a tracking of mediatized moving concepts as they shape life in a particular place and time, animates what Michael Lampert argues is the role of contemporary ‘global’ anthropology as it ‘prides itself on critically pluralizing concepts that purport to be the same across contexts…to work as connoisseurs of the ‘not quite’ rather than peddlers of the strange.’”
Between these two passages, we get a sense of the “globally familiar” both as a wide-reaching descriptor of the kinds of material behaviors and circuits of imagining your interlocutors are engaged in as well as a theoretical praxis through which you orient your own scholarly work within larger anthropological and other disciplinary discourse. Can you speak more to how the “globally familiar” spans material infrastructures and projects of theorizing and meaning making, both for you and your interlocutors?
Gabriel: Thank you for your close reading! I first started to think about what familiarity and the familiar might mean in the context of my research when I spent time in early 2013 with a couple of branding consultants who were hired by global multinationals interested in cultivating India’s enormous youth market segment. In our conversations, the consultants used the term familiar to describe the desires and aspirations of young people across the world in relation to consumption, urban space, and practice, specifically youth cultural practices like bboying or skateboarding. Drawing from 21st century marketing discourse that has increasingly moved away from marketing ‘products’ towards inculcating ‘lifestyles,’ the branding agents I was in conversation with (and others who came later) were charged with fostering the nascent and globally wired youth scenes in the country by curating a series of events in major cities across India (Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi) that featured local bboys, skateboarders, BMXers, graf artists and so on.
For these branding consultants, producing the familiar through the events they curated and the digital traces of them that circulated in social media was a way to signal the kind of always already global connectedness between metropolitan centers across nation-state boundaries that has only intensified through digital connection. They did so by mobilizing familiar youth practices and amplifying their aesthetics in the events they curated as well as introducing new ones, hoping they would stick. Something clicked for me in my conversations with these branding agents. I realized the hip hop practitioners in Delhi I spent time with, albeit in a different register and towards different ends, were also producing the familiar through their online and offline practices in ways that put them, their city, and their neighborhoods on the map, so to speak, as global subjects. Once I got hooked on the concept, I couldn’t stop thinking with it! It did, however, take me a while to write about it as I couldn’t wrap my head, at the time, around how the different scales these young people traversed—the local, national, the transnational—coincided and informed one another.
At the time, as I was conducting fieldwork, I was reading and grappling with research on digital worlds. Much of the research I encountered separated ‘infrastructure’ from self-making, online worlds from offline consequences, and the national from the transnational. The familiar, it occurred to me after lots of thinking, writing, and rewriting, allowed me to put my interlocutors’ political, economic, social, and cultural concerns and everyday experiences into the same frame to engage, as you so eloquently put it, with their “material behaviors and circuits of imagining” that linked geographies and temporalities in their online/offline worlds. Eventually, the familiar became a way for me to approach what I instinctively felt was the inseparability of affect, infrastructure, mediation, and value and to recognize these different geographic scales were linked through circulating signs.
Hip hop mela, South Delhi 2013. Photo by Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan.
As for theoretical praxis, my training in linguistic anthropological method and theory opened the door for me to think about what Asif Agha (and others) call processes of enregisterment. Enregisterment occurs when particular semiotic features from elsewhere become part of a localized repertoire of practice. I found that tracking specific signs as they were being deployed in the Delhi hip hop scene allowed me to tether my thinking in the familiar and the gendered, racialized dimensions of its possibilities. For instance, I discuss swag—as a discourse linked to Black American masculinity—and track and trace how the concept/sign materializes amongst Delhi’s hip hop practitioners and what kind of ‘work’ it does for them and on them. This methodological move allowed me to locate the familiar in online and offline spaces and document its unfolding in specific ways. Paying close attention to floating and deployed signifiers also allowed me to think with and through performance theory about the conditions of possibility within the online and offline interactional frameworks I was privy to witness and participate in.
Tara: I’ve looked a bit at your 2015 Ph.D. dissertation, which was also focused on your fieldwork in Delhi’s burgeoning hip hop scene. There, your thinking centered on the concept of “aesthetic citizenship” within what might be described as a more state-centered, (sub)national scope of analysis. What prompted you to undertake a conceptual shift to the more transnationally oriented “globally familiar?”
Gabriel: I started writing my dissertation while I was still living in Delhi. I was very much thinking about the ways in which the caste, class, and racially marginalized young men I was spending time with were interpellated into the discourse of the nation-state in a moment where India’s neoliberal shifts were coinciding with an increasingly shrill Hindu supremacist discourse animating public discourse. By coining aesthetic citizenship, I was attempting to create a theoretical-conceptual scaffolding to engage with these concerns. There was a well-developed anthropological literature on citizenship I could draw on and put into conversation with a newer body of work on aesthetics and politics. Writing while in the ‘field’ pushed me towards particular modes of narration and theorization. There was also, of course, the anxiety that came with the reality that my funding would run out that goaded me on and pushed me to theorize within my comfort zone.
I finished my dissertation (and PhD) in 2015 and put aside the project for a time. But every day, at some level, I was thinking about the dissertation and vaguely dissatisfied with how it turned out. In attempting to pay close attention to subnational and national scales I had, effectively, put aside important discussions about transnational Blackness and hip hop, or about the historical and emergent links between urban geographies across nation-states. While it remains true that a good dissertation is a done dissertation, I knew that if I was going to transform the dissertation into a book, I needed to find a way to bring all of these different elements into conversation. In those years after graduate school that nagging feeling about the familiar began to take form. Over the course of three years—while as a VAP at Haverford College in Philly and as lecturer at Goldsmiths, I rewrote the manuscript so that it was ready for review and then, of course, rewrote and revised again based on the tremendous and generous feedback of my reviewers. It was through this process of rewriting and revision that I found a way—through the familiar—to bring what were unarticulated or underdeveloped ideas together. Even after I published the book there are days when I wake up ruminating about a particular chapter or passage and wince, thinking I could have said it better or been in conversation with a scholar I have since read. Books, I’ve learned, are also (like dissertations) way stations for our thinking. I think it’s necessary for obvious and not so obvious reasons, to let them go and be in the world but also to remember that they are not conclusions but rather a means to share our journey along the way.
Tara: Gender also takes on a more expansively elaborated focus in the book. How did the issue of masculine subjectivity come to take center stage in your project, and how do you feel the literature on hip hop’s global diffusion can benefit from increased attentiveness to the gendered aspects of identity formation?
Gabriel: My fieldnotes and field recordings were brimming with moments of gendered performance and self-conscious articulations of masculinity. When I first started writing my dissertation, these ethnographic instances found their way into the narrative. I wound up, for my dissertation, offering an analysis of these scenes but not developing a framework to engage with them as you put it, as an elaborated focus. In part this was because of my own uncertainty around how to theorize gender in any sort of serious way. In graduate school I was surrounded by brilliant peers who were explicitly focused on gender in their projects. In particular, there was one person in my program who was working on masculinity in India. I stayed away from engaging/theorizing masculinity as a core thematic for years because I had this false sense that I would be impinging on their work or that I was not well-versed enough to be able to take it on in a fulsome way. It was only during the review process for the book, when one of my reviewers told me that it was clear, based on the gender analysis woven through every chapter, that I needed to take responsibility and scaffold it properly, that I let go of the feeling that I was an imposter or that I couldn’t write about masculinities in India because someone else might be writing about it. It quickly became obvious, as I started to write about global hip hop and masculinity in more detail for the intro chapter, that it was critical I do so. While research on American hip hop has focused on gender formation and gender ideology, much of the work on global hip hop hasn’t (as I explain in the introduction to the book). I had an opportunity to theorize masculinity in ways that elucidated the multiple performances and ideologies of gender in Delhi—as it is refracted through race, ethnicity, and class—and show (hopefully) in some sort of nuanced way the relationship between global discourses on gender (and race) and their localized embodiments and re-articulations.
Tara: You discuss in the book how media coverage and brand interest in the emergence of digitally enabled hip hop practice among youth in urban Delhi and elsewhere in India has been motivated by a desire to locate an authentically “subaltern” cultural product or subjectivity. Indeed, such narrativizing can also be seen in much scholarship on hip hop and “subcultures” more generally, as well as in scholarship on Delhi’s urban poor that you describe as having tended to emphasize either helpless passivity or anachronistic but equally doomed resistance to top-down imaginings of the city’s future. How has your thinking sought to take stock of current debates regarding the longstanding framework of hegemony/subaltern resistance among scholars of South Asia, hip hop, and media? Who are some of the thinkers you have turned to in conceptualizing the politics of resistance involved in something like “subalternity” or cultural production “from below” while accounting for your interlocutors’ apparently active interests in self-promotion within the larger culture industry?
Gabriel: The idea of the subaltern (and hegemony) emerges out of Gramsci’s thinking and re-articulation of Marx’s theorization between base and superstructure or, if you like, political economy and culture. Calling for an attention to a more subtle, supple, and entangled relationship between culture, power, and political economy, the term subaltern, for Gramsci, became a shorthand term to describe those who are excluded from all facets of social, cultural, political, and economic life in the emergent nation-state of the late 19th/early 20th century. The term, as we know, was picked up most famously by the subaltern studies collective in the late 20th century, who mobilized the concept to develop what they described as a counter-history of India, one which centered ‘subaltern’ groups, putting the narratives of those in power in the postcolony into context and relief.
One of the problems of subalternity, as Spivak pointed out in her germinal essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, was that it erased differences (and the different positionalities) of various marginalized communities sublated within the concept. These complex differences become quite critical, particularly when engaging with urban marginality, where peripheralization and access are always partial and mediated by various factors, which in the Indian context includes gender, caste, class, religion, ethnicity, linguistic competency, and technological literacy, to name a few. What I grew interested in, as you rightly flag, are the ways in which hip hop authenticity is predicated on the deployment of marginality as a sign of value and the kinds of opportunities that emerge when the MCs, graf writers, DJs, and dancers mobilized various markers to successfully claim a ‘subaltern’ position in Delhi. Rather than simply thinking about these mobilizations as a form of resistance to erasure or marginalization, I wanted to think in a more complex way about the potentials for participation in the cultural, political, and economic worlds of the city and nation that these somewhat reductive performances created. It seemed there was an opportunity to develop valuable insights into what possibilities digital self-making was producing as well as what frictions between various racialized and disenfranchised groups in the city that it was making visible. I drew on the wonderful essay by Lila Abu-Lughod, The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women, for inspiration. In the essay Abu-Lughod argues that rather than taking forms or instances of ‘resistance’ at face value, we might use them as a diagnostic of how power operates within a given context. Hip hop, as a cultural practice of marginalized self-identification and as a performance of resistance, became a way for the diverse young men I met in Delhi to gain access and make connections, even if the access was uneven, partial, and, ultimately, exclusionary towards some in the scene. Hip hop also framed their debates and disagreements with each other, debates linked to broader concerns around economic mobility, gendered space, shifts in the city’s infrastructure, and the articulation of racism as a shared experience of disenfranchisement. In each case, I was offered multiple entry points, ways to think through the kinds of power relations that shape the lives of young men living on the peripheries of Delhi’s capital city.
Tara: Your last chapter, titled “Race and Place,” centers on how a discourse on race, based in awareness of anti-Black racism in the United States but with broader roots in the global order of settler colonialism, creates conditions for both solidarity and fracture among young migrant men from Africa and India’s northeastern hinterlands as well as young Dalit men experiencing discrimination in urban Delhi. Throughout the chapter, you discuss how hip hop constituted a means for these men to imagine a future “otherwise” just as they remained largely excluded or absent from the center of Delhi’s hip hop scene. What do these contradictions reveal about how the “global familiars” of hip hop and race/racism are taken up in context-specific ways to produce novel social formations and subjectivities? How can framing race as a “globally familiar” indexer of difference push forward scholarly thinking on race and/or/vs. caste in South Asia, which, as you note in the book, has been closely related to an animated discourse of solidarity between Dalits and African Americans stretching back at least to the twentieth century?
Gabriel: These are fantastic questions! I will try and concisely respond to both. With regards to the contradiction you highlight, there is something about the digitally wired present that allows, even invites, one to represent localized experiences of racialized exclusion in ways that facilitate transnational (and sometimes local) connection. This is particularly true when hip hop becomes the idiom and cultural repertoire for articulation. The potential for transnational connection (and all the potentials that suggest) mitigates, even, one could say, gives purpose/meaning to one’s experience of localized exclusion. To think through this, I drew from Halif Ousumare’s excellent work, where she argues that hip hop has been a means for the African diaspora to connect across geographies about their experiences of racialized modernity in ways that are meaningful and create relationships within and across the diaspora. In The Globally Familiar and, in particular, the chapter you mention, I suggest that hip hop’s connective potentials are magnified in the digital moment, in ways that link racialized communities across the globe and open up the potential for conversations and about shared colonial, imperial histories and current conditions of impossibility that, potentially, open the door towards imagining an otherwise at multiple scales. These potentials for an otherwise are enabled through shared musical and audiovisual production that the digital technologies of capture and circulation enable. Of course, this is a very hopeful stance. The other possibility is a kind of flattening, where the rapid circulation and uptake of a primarily US-centric hip hop aesthetic leads to the reiteration of a US black/white racial binary as a descriptive shorthand that obscures local conditions. This, of course, limits a deeper engagement with the shared and particular histories that shape life across contexts (see Jennifer Gordon-Roth’s work on the racial trafficking of US Black/White binaries in the context of Brazil).
Satpula Cipha, South Delhi 2014. Photo by Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan.
The Globally Familiar portends this very problem with regards to any meaningful conversation on the relationship between race and caste. I think it is all too easy to collapse these two systems of hierarchical oppression—each with their own historical genealogies—into one another. The harder task is to think through how these two systems coincide and inform one another historically and, as importantly, what differentiates them in the present, towards the goal of dismantling both. South Asia offers an important site to study historical and contemporary race/caste formations—to think about the legacy, on the one hand, of colonial processes of racialization, and, on the other, of enduring caste formations. So do the settler-colonial contexts where diasporas from the subcontinent, new and old, reside and coincide with African diasporas and indigenous communities. There is some fabulous work coming out (or that has come out) in anthropology and adjacent disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations that engage some of these histories, overlaps, and distinctions and there is a need for more! My last chapter offers the beginnings of my thinking through these histories and overlaps—which I am planning to pick up in my next book project on anti-Blackness and Afro-Asian solidarity in Delhi.
Tara: The book’s first chapter and epilogue feature your extended reflections on the ethics of ethnographic research, particularly as technologically-enabled forms of connectedness bring about the extension of networks cultivated during research well beyond what might have ever been accurately described as the bounded “field.” Drawing upon John Lester Jackson Jr.’s and Danilyn Rutherford’s respective calls for “ethnographic sincerity” and “kinky empiricism,” you come to describe the importance of “thinking about the sincerity, kinkiness, and relationality of ethnography as a king of active ethical exercise located in the giving of material and immaterial gifts” (The Globally Familiar, p. 45).
This brought to mind works by Mauss, Malinowski, and others in which practices of gift exchange commanded such intense focus from the early ethnographic gaze. Your suggestion that there is an ethical imperative for ethnographers to view and honestly describe themselves as givers and bearers of gifts—and thus as implicated within circulations of social and material debt which “cannot simply be fulfilled through a fidelity of representation” (The Globally Familiar, p. 45)—would seem to have powerful implications for a discipline whose foundational texts were largely uninterested in accounting for the ethnographer’s own entailments in circuits of reciprocity. Can you tell us more about how practices of gift exchange and reciprocity have informed both your fieldwork and approach to writing for this book? How do you think up-front conversations about ethical quandaries surrounding reciprocity in and beyond the field can better prepare researchers and improve the practice of ethnography in anthropology and other disciplines?
Gabriel: When I started graduate school, after years of doing community and popular education work in the US, I had in mind that any research I undertook had to be reciprocal or shared. My research imagination, informed by years of using Freirian and Boalian methods to engage young people, naturally went this route and I looked forward to extending my experience as a teacher/educator into my ethnographic encounters. However, after a year or two in graduate school I grew uncertain. Perhaps, I thought, I should ‘study up,’ as I felt doing anthropological research with vulnerable communities, no matter what my intention, goals, or methods, would always wind up becoming extractive. In my second year I travelled to South India. I had been invited to do a short research project in an educational NGO in Karnataka state and my intention was to use the opportunity to develop a research project focusing on educational NGOs and the elite, upper caste transnationals who ran them. It was, I felt at the time, a more ethical project to undertake.
But, after three months working with some of the folks in these NGOs, I decided that I couldn’t possibly spend multiple years studying the class, caste, and racial politics that informed their interventions. After so many years doing community-based and youth-focused work, it felt alienating and not the best use of my skills and time. It was around this time that friends and acquaintances put me on to the emerging hip hop scene in Delhi and Mumbai. I was immediately interested (and excited). I felt drawn to this project because my experience as an immigrant growing up in New York City in a working class neighborhood in Queens in a time when hip hop was exploding on the scene (late 1980s, early 1990s) coincided with some of what I imagined/felt I would encounter in Delhi. I thought my experience and positionality as a diaspora kid returned had the potential to create openings, connections, relations, and insights. I also instinctively knew that I could offer something to the scene and the cultural producers that comprised it in the way of my production skills.
I share this story because I think that it is important to recognize that every project offers different possibilities for creating reciprocal exchange and that our experience and positions in the world can and perhaps should play a large part in determining where/how/and with whom we do our research. I imagine if I had done the project with NGOs in South India, perhaps the sincerest gift I could have offered would have been critique. As one senior anthropologist whose advice I sought early on when I was still thinking of doing the project with the NGO in Karnataka told me: those who do the nitty gritty work between the state and the community on the ground—NGO personnel, teachers, social workers and so on—already know the ins and outs of their jobs and don’t need someone to tell them about it or try to do it for them. What they want is another way to look at the work they do. I never forgot this advice which was, ultimately, all about building relationships by making oneself available, vulnerable, and open to sharing what one has to offer.
In the Delhi hip hop scene, which is where I ultimately found myself, critique wasn’t (at least immediately) what was needed or welcome. Instead, my production skills and my knowledge of hip hop became gifts I could bring that opened the possibility for a relationship and exchange. All of my writing and making with regards to this project has been shaped by the kinds of exchanges, friendships, and even disagreements and frictions that my gifts of time, skills, and stories enabled. I wouldn’t have developed the relationships with the young men, many of which continue ten years since I first arrived in the city, if we hadn’t had a shared love of hip hop and made together and, in making, studied Delhi’s worlds all those years ago.
I now have the privilege to teach ethnographic methods to amazing PhD students at Goldsmiths. In my teaching I absolutely stress reciprocity and relationship building, not as an instrumental means to an end, but the only way one can embody an ethical position as an ethnographer. After all, if we are invited to, as you so nicely put it, participate in existing circuits of reciprocity, how can we not share something of ourselves in them and invest in the interactions it enables—even if they are uncomfortable or difficult—as part of the front stage that what we, ultimately, write up and share with others?
Still from Let Him Fly (2021). Courtesy of Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan.
Tara: I believe you recently released a collaborative film, titled Let Him Fly / उसे उड़ने दो, that intersects with this book project. To what extent has the conception of this film been informed by The Globally Familiar, and/or vice versa?
Gabriel: Let Him Fly is a 29-minute film that I co-produced with filmmaker Priya Sen. We recently finished postproduction and it premieres, as it rightly should have, at a bboy jam in Delhi, on September 19th, 2021. I’ve also submitted to a few film festivals and look forward to sharing in various venues (universities, hip hop spaces) in the years to come. If you’re interested in screening it, let me know!
Priya edited the film after years of pushing me to do something with the footage that I and the bboys, MCs, and graf writers shot over the span of nine years. Two years ago, I finally handed over the footage to Priya after she finally said she would be willing to edit a cut. I had harbored the idea that I would cut the film with some of the bboys and MCs featured in it. When it became evident that this wasn’t going to happen, I knew that I couldn’t edit it myself. I was too close to the material. Also, I had just finished working on the book. In our conversations, Priya made the good point that if I tried to cut the film on my own I would get too cerebral with the footage and wind up narrativizing the film in a way that wouldn’t do justice to the sensorial, relational, and visceral nature of the footage. She even made a point, during my book launch, that she was happy she hadn’t read my book when she was in the editing room or it would have influenced her too much. In this sense, the film intersects with the book insofar as it offers moments, scenes, and encounters that emerged during and after my primary fieldwork. It departs from the book in that it doesn’t try to theorize, explain, or thematically follow any of the threads of the book.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the BA in Anthropology & Media and is the Co-Director of the Centre for Visual Anthropology. His research engages multiple media in examining the growing impact of digital communications technology on understandings of gender, race, migration and urban space among youth.
Tara Giangrande is an MA Student in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. Her research is currently engaged in online media publicity, the globalization of New World Order conspiracy theory, and notions of the speculative in the context of contemporary India. She is Content and Design Manager at Borderlines.