We live in an age of excess — of images, information, texts, and sounds. Various forms of ‘applied' and ‘fine' art attempt, in various ways, to create iconic moments, figures and images, yearning to capture and surpass time or the eternal ‘present-ness' of time. In the process, these signs and icons seem to congeal time or the spirit of the times in mysterious ways. They capture and re-present the stirrings of the time through forms, figures, images or affects that work at the conscious and unconscious, liminal and subliminal levels. Bishnupriya Ghosh's path-breaking book Global Icons is an attempt to take a “hard look at this fabulous proliferation of images, zooming in on those that attract intense affect, spawn spectacles, or motivate collective action.”
This analysis of global icons and the enigmatic ways in which they work through the global fabric and the local public imagination revolves around three very contrasting images from different fields of signification. They are of three women: Phoolan Devi, Arundhati Roy, and Mother Teresa.
The image of Phoolan Devi is one of transition from an outlaw, the ‘bandit queen' who surrendered to the police, to a star politician gathering iconic force from regional Dalit identity and eventually finding a parliamentary berth. The image of the woman with arms upraised, according to Ghosh, had become the mediator of a structure of feeling for an emergent collective — possible but yet to come.
In contrast, Arundhati Roy's image entered the global scene when she won the Booker Prize in 1997. This image of hers as a new, confident and glamorous face of globalising India underwent a transformation when she reinvented herself as a social activist by taking up the cause of environmental justice, as in the Narmada and Plachimada projects. The new iconic sign represented the face of the ‘global green'.
Long history
As for Mother Teresa's iconic image, it has had a longer and global history. She captured global attention in 1973 when she became the first Roman Catholic nun to appear on the cover of the Time magazine. This icon soon ‘grew' into that of an embodiment “of giving where the Christian missionary once more appears the benefactor to an overpopulated Third World.”
Evidently, all these icons also map their complex negotiations with power at various levels and of various kinds — symbolic, social, economic, and political. By taking these three icons, the author has the double imperative of telling “a local story of global modernity.” Their stories not only ponder over the materiality of the sign in terms of sexual difference, but also map a particular terrain of responses to neoliberalism in South Asia and to its economic, political, and techno-scientific schemes.
Global Icons, a theoretically informed treatise, examines the processes, affects, and effects through which a familiar sign or an artefact is given symbolic density, letting them assume a certain kind of materiality that invites adoration and desecration and makes social impacts in a variety of ways. Its approach is not only to theoretically ‘demolish' the mass stupefaction that icons are capable of but also to probe the social efficacy of contemporary mass-mediated images. For, “a capacious materialist analysis of suddenly volatised (but hitherto ordinary) icons might explain the operations of these media in times when iconoclasm, iconophilia, and even iconomania are on the rise.” And these key signifiers of collective aspiration, icons that erupt into social phenomena, also provide evidence of embattled responses to global modernity amid intensifying global interconnections.
In an exercise of this kind, icons are not just instruments that manufacture mass stupefaction and consent, but also congealed yet eruptive forces capable of unsettling totalising systems, where they suddenly transform themselves into volatile signifiers of a popular movement against hegemonic forces.
In this context, Ghosh, taking Coca Cola as an instance, looks at how the global intersects the local in unpredictable ways: on the one hand, it lures the local into the global paradise of consumption and, on the other, its own proliferation as global icon offers the protest movements the cultural means to form or deform such attachments to the global, subversive ends.
GLOBAL ICONS — Apertures to the Popular: Bishnupriya Ghosh; Duke University Press, Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660. $ 25.95.
