Overview

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.

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9780822345671

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This pioneering book expands the anthropology of a crucial part of India, a state with a complex agrarian history, an active communist movement, and remarkable achievements in literacy and social consciousness. Engaging with college-age youth in this part of the world, Ritty A. Lukose provides a remarkable account of the dreams and struggles of young adults as they seek to negotiate gender, caste, and globalization in a new century. Her book will be of great interest to students of youth cultures, education, globalization, and South Asia. --Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger Liberalization's Children is a fascinating exploration of key contemporary issues in India with relevance for other non-Western contexts. Ritty A. Lukose investigates the formation of gendered identities in Kerala in relation to nationalist constructions of femininity and masculinity as well as the pulls of migration to West Asia and North America. Her achievement is to provide a useful mapping of the continuity with older forms of gendering alongside the disruptions caused by the developments of the 1990s. She does this by showing how the axes of difference emerging from colonial and post-colonial modernities underpin the apparently new experiences of globalization. --Tejaswini Niranjana, author of Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad

Author Information

Ritty Lukose is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

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