In Progress

Natasha Warikoo has been focusing on youth in multicultural settings, one of the most influential populations within global youth culture. In “Racial Authenticity Among Second Generation Youth in Multiethnic New York and London,” she explores issues of authenticity and boundary crossing among teens within a multiethnic context through their cultural consumption habits. Warikoo explores students at multiethnic schools in New York and London to discover a single status hierarchy existing within each setting. The paper is assumes that authenticity is not a fixed concept, but a way of making meaning that helps teens establish boundaries and an ordering system for assigning status.

Authenticity is a contested term that Warikoo explores in some depth before delving into her findings. She also introduces boundary crossing and blurring as a key aspect of multiethnic societies, in which cultural practices are drawn from more than one ethnic or racial category. The study draws on a variety of strategies, including a random survey of 191 teens at two sites, ethnographic observation at two sites, and 120 in-depth interviews. The sites were located in London and New York.

Warikoo finds that a single status hierarchy can be found in multiethnic settings where multiple strains of cultural practices coexist. This is achieved partially through reinforcing racial and ethnic boundaries based on cultural consumption and expression, a policing system that develops among peers that reinforces essentialized qualities of ethnic and racial identities. Warikoo also discovers that currently, “black” culture is considered to be the mainstream, disseminated through MTV among other mass media sources, and that while non-black teens adopt black cultural tastes and practices, South Asians specifically adopt a hybridized version that incorporates ethnic Indian styles and music. Globalization has also had a huge impact on popular culture, with New York a center for black culture, and London a center for South Asian culture.

Warikoo, Natasha. “Racial Authenticity Among Second Generation Youth in Multiethnic New York and London.” Poetics 35.6 (2007): 388. PDF. 15 November 2008.

Posted on December 5th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Global Culture, School, Uncategorized