Consumption
University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
GSE Publications
Graduate School of Education
6-1-2005
Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in
Kerala, India
Ritty Lukose ralukose@gse.upenn.edu Reprinted from Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Issue 4, June 2005, pages 915-935.
Publisher URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsh/
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/30
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.
CONSUMING GLOBALIZATION:
YOUTH AND GENDER IN KERALA, INDIA
By Ritty Lukose
University of Pennsylvania
Introduction
In much popular discourse, a short-hand way to mark the advent and impact of globalization is to point to the evidence of “global” youth consuming practices and symbols in often remote corners of the world: during the 1990s, for example, the popularity of the basketball star Michael Jordan and his team the Chicago
Bulls in the slums of Brazil and in rural villages in Africa, the spread of hip-hop music around the world, and the popularity of McDonalds among young people in China. These examples have a theory of globalization and youth embedded within them. Youth is seen as a consuming social group, the first to bend to what is understood to be the homogenizing pressures of globalization, a globalization fundamentally tied to Americanization.1 Youth consumption practices become an index of the presence and reach of globalization.
Such short-hand ways of indexing the salience of contemporary forms of globalization as a cultural force obscure the ways in which new global cultural forms are inserted into long-standing struggles over the meanings of modernity in many postcolonial locations.2 While attention to globalization as a new cultural force is crucial to understanding the changed cultural, political, and economic conditions under which much of the postcolonial world now struggles, situating globalization within long-standing
ScholarlyCommons
GSE Publications
Graduate School of Education
6-1-2005
Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in
Kerala, India
Ritty Lukose ralukose@gse.upenn.edu Reprinted from Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Issue 4, June 2005, pages 915-935.
Publisher URL: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jsh/
This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/30
For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.
CONSUMING GLOBALIZATION:
YOUTH AND GENDER IN KERALA, INDIA
By Ritty Lukose
University of Pennsylvania
Introduction
In much popular discourse, a short-hand way to mark the advent and impact of globalization is to point to the evidence of “global” youth consuming practices and symbols in often remote corners of the world: during the 1990s, for example, the popularity of the basketball star Michael Jordan and his team the Chicago
Bulls in the slums of Brazil and in rural villages in Africa, the spread of hip-hop music around the world, and the popularity of McDonalds among young people in China. These examples have a theory of globalization and youth embedded within them. Youth is seen as a consuming social group, the first to bend to what is understood to be the homogenizing pressures of globalization, a globalization fundamentally tied to Americanization.1 Youth consumption practices become an index of the presence and reach of globalization.
Such short-hand ways of indexing the salience of contemporary forms of globalization as a cultural force obscure the ways in which new global cultural forms are inserted into long-standing struggles over the meanings of modernity in many postcolonial locations.2 While attention to globalization as a new cultural force is crucial to understanding the changed cultural, political, and economic conditions under which much of the postcolonial world now struggles, situating globalization within long-standing