Youth and Globalization: Changing Trajectories of Culture and Politics

Abstract

Having begun research more than twenty years ago on issues of youth, gender and globalization in India, I am struck by the changing resonances of the title of this volume, Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. During the early 1990s when I started thinking about youth issues within the state of Kerala, in southwestern India — where much of my work has been situated — the ‘age of global media’ and its impact on youth would conjure up visions of ‘McWorld’, to use Benjamin Barber’s reductionism, implying the impact of global consumer culture on the youth of so-called ‘traditional’ societies (Barber, 1995). Much debate centred on whether and how globalization was a radical new force and how it might be transforming societies around the world. Youth were quickly linked to globalization as harbingers of an emergent, newly global world order. Debates ensued about whether youth were victims or agents of the new and whether their experiences demonstrated the dominance of a homogenizing global culture that was displacing local cultures or alternatively the emergence of hybridity, fragmentation, differentiation and fluidity. Whichever side one tilted towards, much of this initial burst of work on youth and globalization emphasized the new geographies and spatialities of youth within non-Western contexts while simultaneously identifying new articulations between youth, culture and globalization (see, for example, Amit-Talai and Wulff, 1995; Skelton and Valentine, 1998).