University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Aesthetic Citizenship: Popular Culture, Migrant Youth, and the Making of 'World Class' Delhi Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Dattatreyan, Ethiraj Gabriel, "Aesthetic Citizenship: Popular Culture, Migrant Youth, and the Making of 'World Class' Delhi" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1037. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1037 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1037 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Aesthetic Citizenship: Popular Culture, Migrant Youth, and the Making of 'World Class' Delhi Abstract Delhi has nearly doubled in population since the early 1990s due to in-migration (censusindia.gov, 2011). These migrants, like migrants around the world, strive to adapt to their new surroundings by producing themselves in ways which make them socially, economically, and politically viable. My project examines how recent international and intranational immigrant youth who have come to Delhi to partake in its economic possibilities and, in some cases, to escape political uncertainty, are utilizing globally circulating popular cultural forms to make themselves visible in a moment when the city strives to recast its image as a world class destination for roaming capital (Roy, 2011). I focus on two super diverse settlement communities in South Delhi to explore the citizenship making claims of immigrant youth who, to date, have been virtually invisible in academic and popular narratives of the city. Specifically, I follow three groups of ethnically diverse migrant youth from these two settlement communities as they engage with hip hop, a popular cultural form originating in Black American communities in the 1970s (Chang, 2006; Morgan, 2009; Rose, 1994).