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

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 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 the:sis of the globalization paradigm. First, the imagined form of the 'global' is produced through cultural signs that rest on the deployment nationalist narrative. Second, media representations depict India's relationship the world economy through images of a hybrid relation between the national the global. Finally, globalization in India has led to a form of which polices the boundaries of gendered social codes.