Globalization on the Ground

New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India

Unlike élite middle-class Indians, ordinary Indian men are selective in their acceptance of new meanings introduced by cultural globalization. In Globalization on the Ground: Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India, Steve Derné argues that the effects of globalization on existing cultural values differ among social groups. The non-élite middle class in India, for whom globalization has brought little change in economic position and opportunities, has resisted changes to existing ideas about family, marriage, and gender relations. The book suggests that the non-élite middle class accepts only those meanings which can be layered on top of existing meanings that support obdurate social structures, thereby reiterating existing social stereotypes. So, the newly available Arnold Schwarzenegger films intensify the association of violence with masculinity, and foreign pornography incites new means of expressing male dominance.

The book also considers how globalization has transformed class and gender in India. Derné argues that with globalization, class identities are defined more by transnational contexts than within bounded nations, are based more on shared patterns of consumption than shared positions in the economy, and are increasingly defined by gender relations.

Globalization on the Ground will appeal to students and scholars of globalization, mass media, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.