Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and co-editor of the Multimodal Section of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. He received a joint PhD in Anthropology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania

For almost a decade Gabriel has utilized collaborative, multimodal, and speculative approaches to research how media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital hip hop, masculinity and urban space in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), narrates how Delhi’s young working class and migrant men adopt hip hop’s globally circulating aesthetics— accessed through inexpensive smartphones and cheap internet connectivity that radically changed India’s media landscape in the early aughts— to productively re-fashion themselves and their city. Recently, Gabriel has become interested in the ways that corporate owned social media platforms have become a site for a rearticulation and disruption of enduring forms of coloniality. His second book, co-written with Sahana Udupa and titled Digital Unsettling:Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (NYU Press, forthcoming), explores these developments and their material consequences.

Prior to joining NYU, Gabriel was a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London where he co-directed the Centre for Visual Anthropology.

Gabriel is currently working on a new manuscript that draws from over eight years of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s and Pune’s African communities and from an archive of films made by Nigerian and Kenyan film students in the 1960s and 1970s and housed at The Film and Television Institute of India (Pune). In the book he explores how Afro-Asian political solidarities in the early postcolonial period have given way to an ambivalent yet nostalgic relationship in an anti-Black and increasingly Hindu right-wing present that prevails in India today. He is also working on a book project with a collective of scholars primarily based in Southern Africa. The project - rooted in a shared 14-day bus journey from Cape Town, South Africa to Namibe, Angola that took place in the summer of 2022 - explores the anticolonial research methods and pedagogical practices of an Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho. Taking Zita’s work and unexplained disappearance as a point of departure, they seek to open a set of multimodal propositions on the aftermath of colonial and apartheid violence and the possibilities and dangers of waywardness as a method and orientation.