Consumerist Encounters: Flirting with Things and Images ISBN: 9780190991333 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Society and Culture; Social Psychology;
Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swamped the markets. Expanding field of commodification infiltrated consumer minds through media imageries. New objects of desire aroused inhibited cravings. This engendered an accelerated and intensified relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives. Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.
Sreedeep Bhattacharya, Associate Professor, Department of Center for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University
Sreedeep Bhattacharya is a Sociologist. He is currently Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University. As a sociologist and as a photographer, he engages with various aspects of the contemporary visual, material and popular cultures. His ongoing research projects include 'themed sites of consumption', 'representation of commodities in cinema', 'making of the fashion image', and 'print advertisements in colonial Bengal'. He is also working on an autobiographical account on adolescent experiences titled 'Trauma'.
