In The Globally Familiar Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan traces how the rapid development of information and communication technologies in India has created opportunities for young people to creatively explore their gendered, classed, and racialized subjectivities in and through transnational media worlds. His ethnography focuses on a group of diverse young, working-class men in Delhi as they take up the African diasporic aesthetics and creative practices of hip hop. Dattatreyan shows how these aspiring b-boys, MCs, and graffiti writers fashion themselves and their city through their online and offline experimentations with hip hop, thereby accessing new social, economic, and political opportunities while acting as consumers, producers, and influencers in global circuits of capitalism. In so doing, Dattatreyan outlines how the hopeful, creative, and vitally embodied practices of hip hop offer an alternative narrative of urban place-making in "digital" India.

"“The Globally Familiar convincingly argues that migrant working class young men’s performance of hip hop’s sonic, visual and kinemic aesthetics enables them to reimagine and remake the self and the city.... The book makes a stunning contribution to the burgeoning research on digital cultures, globalization, South Asian urban neighbourhoods and masculinity.”" - Popular Music

"“I am thrilled to learn from and teach this ethnography. With The Globally Familiar, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan has blown up the stage of the normative anthropological and cultural studies understanding of popular culture, India, urban aesthetics, subaltern life, global connections, and hip-hop.”" - Current Anthropology

"“The Delhi that emerges from Dattatreyan’s richly textured writing is like a contact zone or a borderland; a contested, unequal, but not unimaginable or unimaginative urban space.... A concept like the globally familiar allows for a complex understanding of how globalization transforms our cities from below.”" - AAG Review of Books

"“In The Globally Familiar, Gabriel Dattatreyan presents an intimate, complex, and ultimately hopeful ethnography of the hip hop scene in Delhi, India, capturing how hip hop’s meaning comes to be contested in its global circulation and uptake by young men in Delhi.”" - Journal of Anthropological Research

"“The Globally Familiar is an important work in providing a fully intersectional ethnography of the hip hop subculture in Delhi. This book has broad implications for helping us understand global hip hop outside of the West, as well as the globality of cultural activity in India outside of the elite.”" - Journal of Asian Studies