Description:

Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019) demonstrates the paradoxes that result from hip hop’s simultaneous negotiation of local, national, and global conceptions of race and class. Even while featuring tropes and allusions to 1990’s Black American gangsta rap and hip hop culture, Gully Boy features a distinctly Indian racialization of Muslims paradoxically accompanied by anti-Black fetishization of Whiteness. The bildungsroman plot structure thus features the protagonist, Murad—whose name means “desire” or “aspiration”—as a metonym for the power of “asli” hip hop (“real” hip hop) to seemingly transcend the oppressive intersections of race, religion, patriarchy, and class without changing the discursive structures or material conditions that inform this oppression. This film thus powerfully demonstrates the ways that hip hop in India instantiates what Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan refers to as “the globally familiar” as a means to both critique and perpetuate the flows of global White supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Dr. Sara Grewal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include Urdu and world literature, translation, historical poetics, race and ethnicity studies, diaspora studies, and global hip hop. She is currently revising a monograph titled The Urdu Imaginary: Nationalism and the Ghazalization of Urdu, which examines the canonization of the Urdu ghazal as a raciolinguistic means of minoritizing Muslims in India. She is also co-writing a book on Sikh hip hop in the diaspora, titled Dis-locatia, Deterritorialization, and Diaspora in Sikh Hip Hop: The Varieties of Sikh Experience.

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