ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on hip hop's dance performances of the young men, particularly those who looked different from the mostly middle-class 'Indian' patrons, in the mall just across the street from their urban village to engage two distinct yet intertwined theoretical arguments. On the one hand, the young men utilized global hip hop to claim to space in ways that disrupt the normative visualities of Delhi's public urban spaces. The chapter explores how these youth's public performances are a means to think through Rancière's provocative discussions of public art and its possibilities for the political. It focuses on the complicated relationship between space, bodies, and images made possible through digital technology and take the first steps toward theorizing what is called small frame politics. The chapter suggests that retrieve the possibility of the political in the performances of these young people even as they limit the political possibilities of these forms.
