Liberalization's children : gender, youth, and consumer citizenship in globalizing India / Ritty A. Lukose.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lukose, Ritty A., 1968-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Youth--India.

Youth.

Globalization.

Consumption (Economics).

India.

Consumption (Economics)--India.

India--Economic conditions--21st century.

Economic conditions.

Globalization--India.

Physical Description:

xiii, 284 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2009.

Summary:

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. 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.

Contents:

Introduction: liberalization's children : nation, generation, and globalization

Locating Kerala, between development and globalization

Fashioning gender and consumption

Romancing the public

Politics, privatization, and citizenship

Education, caste, and the secular

Epilogue: consumer citizenship in the era of globalization.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822345503

0822345501

9780822345671

0822345676

OCLC:

338618110

Publisher Number:

99935561332