The Globally Familiar Revisited: Ethnographic returns and changing masculinities

This article revisits a key concept – the globally familiar – developed in and through fieldwork with aspirational hip hop artists from migrant backgrounds in Delhi starting in 2011 and culminating in a monograph in 2020 (Dattatreyan 2020). It argues that as the ethnographic field that shaped the original articulation of the concept has shifted and changed and participants from the original study have grown older, new readings of the globally familiar become possible. Specifically, this article focuses on the ways in which the globally familiar, ethnographically detailed in the book as a set of Black aesthetic practices taken up by young people on the margins of social life in Delhi to reimagine themselves and the city they live in through audio-visual production, become a reflection and commentary on India’s changing gendered conditions of possibility. Reading these changing conditions in relation to hip hop’s tremendous success in India in the several years since the original book was released offers a way to return to key actors and reanimate specific concerns related to performances of masculinity in relation to capitalist realist unfoldings in Delhi and beyond.