Generation X Goes Global

Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion

Christine Henseler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136230325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

This edited volume is the first book of its kind to engage critics' understanding of Generation X as a global phenomenon. Citing case studies from around the world, the research collected here broadens the picture of Generation X as a demographic and a worldview. The book traces the global and local flows that determine the identity of each country's youth from the 1970s to today. Bringing together twenty scholars working on fifteen different countries and residing in eight different nations, this book present a community of diverse disciplinary voices. Contributors explore the converging properties of "Generation X" through the fields of literature, media studies, youth culture, popular culture, sociology, philosophy, feminism, and political science. Their ideas also enter into conversation with fourteen other "textbox" contributors who address the question of "Who is Generation X" in other countries. Taken together, they present a highly interactive and open book format whose conversations extend to the reading public on the website www.generationxgoesglobal.com.

Part I

What Generation X?

Moving Beyond the White Middle-Class Slacker

1 A Tale of Three Worlds or More

Young People, Media, and Class in India

Shakuntala Banaji

INTRODUCTION

A burgeoning literature on young people and media consumption in the West has not been matched by similar studies about young people in India or its South Asian neighbors. Published studies on this topic, which will be explored in the opening sections of this chapter, tend to concentrate on urban middle-class Generation Y youth or on the educational importance of technology for rural populations. Issues such as pleasure and participation through media consumption are only mentioned in passing. Yet the rapid neoliberalization of broadcast media and film in India as well as the erstwhile expansion of its middle classes since the 1990s has given rise to a variety of myths about “Indian” youth. Their consumption habits, educational prowess, and aptitude for information technology have been discussed in articles on the new “call center” crews and dance studios. But questions about the other India or Indias remain unanswered—how are working class young people changing their habits in relation to media, work, and consumption? Are young rural migrants to cities and youth in rural areas of India doing the same things and aspiring to the same sorts of lives as their urban counterparts? And how are these aspirations bound up with the media representations that are so ubiquitous in cities? Via snapshots from a decade of interview-based qualitative research, and contemporary literature on the diverse contexts inhabited by children, young people, and their parents in India today, the discussion in this chapter will contextualize the complex lives and experiences of different groups and classes of young people in South Asia's most populous nation. To begin with, it is worth asking how this chapter sits with the volume as a whole and why its title contains no reference to Generation X.

When I first considered the topic of Generation X in India seriously at the editor's request, I was assailed by doubts about the meaningfulness of a study that worked from the barest stereotype in an attempt to delineate any aspect of social life in a contemporary nation of the global south. India's presence in a variety of online literatures from those on development or politics to those on trade and the economy¹ is shadowed by clichés—the “fastest growing market” with “a middle class of 50 million,” the “second-largest” economy in the developing world, the “biggest democracy,” “friend” of the US and Europe in the fight against global terror, and so on. Similarly the presence of youth in academic and policy literatures the world over has been tainted by journalistic pronouncements about declining participation levels, civic disengagement, individualism, risk culture, remix culture, hybrid identities, and a postmodern, global cultural sensibility. Academic articles on Indian cultural production and circulation often open with implicitly homogenizing assertions: “The times they are a-changing! For India, these are historic times. Her long-established and often fiercely guarded traditions are undergoing rapid and sweeping transformations as she flexes her muscles to compete in a global economy” (Chakravorty 112).. In my research on both media cultures in India and youth cultures across South Asia and the UK over the past decade these clichés have proved more a burden than a guide.² They have clearly worked in the interests of some and against the interests of others. So, whose interests have they served?

Numerous academic papers, projects, and studies have been funded and spawned by the notion of a risk society and youth civic disengagement and voting decline.³ Talk of generational breaks and intergenerational rifts, McDonaldized youth culture as well as of patterns of youth consumption can clearly serve the interest of marketers who play on notions of “cool” and “hip” regardless of the context. Counter-arguments—suggesting continuities between generations and heterogeneity within generations, cross-cut as they are by class, ethnicity, ability, religion, age, nationality, gender, and sexuality—are briefly heard and then strenuously ignored. At times it even seems that both academics and marketers are colluding to create the absurdly impossible phenomenon of which they speak: distinct generations with distinct characteristics, the world over. And this, unfortunately, means that real distinctions drawn in India by people campaigning on or researching issues of labor, class, gender, or religious discrimination⁴ between the everyday experiences of the powerful few and the exploited many, are being ignored in favor of clichés. With regard to India, for instance, it is not uncommon to hear that “everyone is now connected” so “let's move it online.” What these businesses mean is that “everyone who matters in terms of service capital” is now connected: the upper middle classes, to be precise.

FIRST CLASS, SEVEN STAR INDIA

Among the upper middle class in India are those who can afford international air travel on a monthly basis, exclusive holidays or go to university in a foreign country—those who have guaranteed housing, running water, multiple servants, private healthcare, laptops, connectivity, cars, and the latest mobile phones.⁵ This group includes those who buy branded clothing both Western and indigenous, who have never been without food or shelter for a day, who participate via various networks in both Indian and global cultural activities from fashion, dance and drama to film, books and music.⁶ Most importantly, many people in this group have connections to political power, to the police and to law enforcement; they can obtain visas and reservations which are denied to others; many, but not all, avoid paying their taxes by hiring the most expensive accountants; on some occasions they can even get out of jail or avoid prosecution for crimes which carry severe sentences; they can fund or withdraw their support from political campaigns; they can and do go into politics. And this group of people—what else can one call it but an indigenous elite?—are not a fiction⁷, although, like the employer in Indian novelist's Arvind Adiga's White Tiger (2008), they are disproportionately represented even in fiction. Indeed, they and their disposable wealth held either in India or overseas have grown exponentially over the past two decades, contributing to everything from global warming via the use of multiple cars⁸ to right-wing religious nationalism and a potential nuclear war with Pakistan. It is worth dwelling for a spell on this group, and on studies of their media habits, their consumption patterns. They are the smallest minority in terms of India's class system (barely 1% of the population are upper middle class), but they are the most internationally visible, the group by which much that is defined as “Indian” is measured and often celebrated. And, ironically doing even the cliché injustice, it is this group who are also often elided with Generation X. While UK-based Bollywood scholar Rachel Dwyer (2000) distinguishes between the public cultural consumption patterns and historical transition of India's “modern metropolitan bourgeois” in terms of old and “new middle classes,” “lower middle classes,” the “upper classes,” and the “noveau riche,”⁹ sociologist Arun Saldanha's ethnography of music consumption in Bangalore is situated amongst the uppermost layer of the nouveau riche (who make up a miniscule 0.01% of the population in India). He discusses the interconnectedness of wealth, spending power, symbolic capital, and political power among this group, suggesting that their “subcultural capital” extends far beyond the obvious power of being chauffeured around in expensive cars in the middle of the day or “midday-parties” held while others are at work and school (341) to the symbolic status conferred by listening to western pop music, hanging out and flirting openly in a society which frowns on and sanctions intimacy between unmarried youth of different genders.

CLASS AND POVERTY IN INDIA

Although it is difficult to find agreement in the conceptualization of class and poverty and the statistics of poverty and wealth arising therefrom, a scan of the statistical studies in this area in 2011 indicates that of India's 1.21 billion population, roughly 0.01% are super-rich. Using the World Bank's undoubtedly dubious definition of middle class (households bringing in US$4,500 to US$22,000), the number of upper- and lower middle-class households in India would then seem to be 28.4 million in year 2009–2010, accounting for some 120 million people. This indicates that well over 80% of the 1.21 billion people in India exist in poverty, as this is defined even by neoliberal economic organizations. According to a report titled “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector” by the state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), an overwhelming majority of this number: “seventy-seven percent of Indians, about 836 million people, live on less than half a dollar a day,” which qualifies as being below the poverty-line as defined by world economic organizations.

—Shakuntala Banaji

Cultural anthropologist Ritty Lukose, who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on gender, class, youth, and consumption in the South Indian state of Kerala (2005), argues that specific gender norms relating to caste or religion continue to structure some of the experiences of children and women even in the most upper-class homes. Lukose rejects some essential commonality of experience between poor women in India and their elite counterparts but acknowledges gendered experiences amongst upper middle-class youth. She intentionally nuances the almost monolithic picture of privilege drawn in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. She suggests that “by paying attention to this terrain (of cultural consumption), it becomes possible to examine the contradictions of consumption for young women and men who are both objects of commoditization and subjects of consumption” (915).. Processes of globalization and cultural consumption in India's neoliberal economy thus have implications both in terms of class and of gender. The beauty industry, with its conspicuous emphasis on the female body and sexuality, is a case in point. This emphasis has become more evident via hotly contested¹⁰ beauty contests, and popularized by the crowning of Indian contestants, such as actress Lara Dutta, as Miss Universe (919).

However, as Lukose proceeds to explore, some of these pageants became the grounds for ferocious debates and violent clashes between different factions of the Indian public—right-wing religious nationalist groups, left-wing feminist groups, marketers, local and global media, and the police forces of various states and towns. Problematically, the ideological tensions between the various groups of protestors were erased in public debate in favor of an almost monolithic moral condemnation of the pageant organizers and participants. This happened despite the fact that for protestors allied with Hindu chauvinist right-wing politics the pageants were constructed as a symbol of some invasive “alien” culture while for feminists the pageants were associated with an “imperialist” and sexist form of “capitalist oppression” (Lukose 923).

In the context of an interview-based study of urban MTV viewers, US-based sociologist of youth and media Vamsee Juluri picks up with overt disapproval on representations of the “nation” on music television. He makes the point that many young Indians assume they are participating in a global youth culture which appreciates and admires “India” in particular, when actually what they are doing is buying into the “easy naturalness” of “poverty, individualism and greed.” Juluri further insists that “the nationalism of youth culture is problematically articulated not only with religious nationalism and intolerance but also in the fact that music video discourses of nationality are profoundly orientalistic.” He argues that young Indians who consume MTV music videos are colluding in their own “exoticization” and “spectacularization” (283).

While not as specific in terms of cultural consumption as in the western literature, there is definitely a suggestion of a generational consciousness amongst the young urban middle classes in particular. In this class group, the pre-liberalization generation, who grew up in a closed economy before 1990, with state TV, radio and school textbooks that had a strong homogenizing national/nationalist vision, is quite distinct from those born in the 1990s. These young people are the ones whose parents have bought them all that money can buy or try to do so. They have also known several bouts of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian pogroms, lived under a quasi-Hindu, neo-fascist government for ten years. They express an affinity for the west but are riven by anxieties about India's traditions and “place in the world.” As will be seen in coming sections, all of this has had little or no effect on many rural and urban working class generational identities—although there are specific places where Generation Y youth in the working classes are losing their traditional occupations, and hence joining a loose urban lumpen proletariat, sometimes ready to be mobilized by fascist identities (anti-democratic, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian). Meanwhile upper middle-class youth from different urban/rural, religious/caste/regional identities have stronger ties to others within their region/caste/language group than they do to young people from other classes, making the case for a generational consciousness even within the upper classes rather weak.

NEGOTIATING HYBRID IDENTITIES? THE EXHAUSTING CONSTRAINT OF BEING LOWER MIDDLE CLASS IN INDIA

Feminist anthropologist Purnima Mankekar discusses the living conditions, aspirations, sexual practices, religious beliefs and political practices, consumer habits, and media consumption of the Indian lower middle classes exhaustively in her 1999 ethnography of television, nationalism, and womanhood in a New Delhi suburb. She points out, however, that their experience of life varies significantly around a consistent core: a patriarchal family structure and lack of privacy/living space. Everything else—from religion, the number of members in a household, and a family's annual income, to political affiliation and educational aspirations—may vary quite significantly between small towns and large metropolises and even between ethnic communities or groups. For instance, according to interviews I have carried out, at least in urban areas, lower middle-class women may work or be confined to their homes. Either of these options generally depends on the demands or agreement of parents, husbands, brothers. Couples may choose to form nuclear family units with their children; but again, living space is a constant and traumatic issue, with privacy at a premium. Lower middle-class families may subscribe to a variety of prejudices such as religious nationalist politics or to what is now considered an “old-fashioned” Nehruvian vision of integration between castes and religions or, occasionally, even to openly socialist politics—but they all have to deal on a daily basis with corrupt bureaucrats,¹¹ lack of school places, rising prices. The implications of these factors for the politics, identifications, consumption patterns and sexual relationships of lower-middle class youth has been explored at some length in my own discussions with Hindi ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: American X: The Ironic History of a Generation
• Introduction: Generation X Goes Global—Tales of Accelerated Cultures
• PART I: What Generation X? Moving Beyond the White Middle-Class Slacker
• PART II: Generation X Rocks to Scenes, Screens, and Comic Strips
• PART III: Riding on Airwaves, Playing for Real, and Reading Without a Net
• PART IV: Tracing Generation X: Going, Going . . . Still Not Gone?
• PART V: Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index