Nationalizing `the global': media images, cultural politics and the middle class in India

Abstract

The article intervenes in the debate over the effects of globalization on the nation-state by exploring the ways in which meanings of the global are produced through the nationalist imagination in India. Globalization in India has unfolded in the context of the `new economic policies' of liberalization initiated in the 1990s. Both television and print media images increasingly contribute to the reproduction of a hegemonic political culture, one that has discarded the remnants of a state-dominated planned economy. An analysis of this process calls into question the post-national thesis of the globalization paradigm. First, the imagined form of the `global' is produced through cultural signs that rest on the deployment of nationalist narrative. Second, media representations depict India's relationship with the world economy through images of a hybrid relation between the national and the global. Finally, globalization in India has led to a form of reterritorialization which polices the boundaries of gendered social codes.