In Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, Bishnupriya Ghosh investigates the ways in which iconic images come to represent global aspirations. Ghosh sees icons as important sites of mediated communication and contestation, and rightfully wants icons to be a field of inquiry within her discipline of media studies. In making this case, she attempts to renew and reinvigorate a materialist theory of the icon informed by feminist theory. She understands an icon to be a “sensation provoking art object that ever enfolds the subject into its form” (p. 8). Icons, she tells us, because of their repetitive circulation, serve to link individual subjects to global social networks with shared aspirations. But these aspirations are plural, and icons “cannot represent only one aspiration” (p. 256). Ghosh focuses upon the controversies and contests that surround the ways in which different publics appropriate icons to represent their own aspirations.
She applies her perspective to interpret the “bio-icons” of Mother Teresa, Phoolan Devi, and Arundhati Roy—the iconic “saint,” “outlaw,” and “activist.” These women have become iconic “star images,” where particular visual representations have been circulated by media institutions, resulting in “publicity,” “standardization,” “repetition,” and “condensation” that collectively serve to frame an image and establish a set of meanings within this frame. Claiming that “narrating the icon becomes combat in the social world, a struggle over one's location in the social through icon consumption” (p. 213), Ghosh focuses her analysis on the “war of signs” that surrounds these women. A strength of the book is the wealth of documentary and ethnographic data upon which Ghosh develops her analysis. These contesting narratives are lenses through which Ghosh identifies the different publics, and the aspirations of these publics, in a world increasingly shaped by global institutions and forces.
Ghosh draws upon two distinct understandings of the “popular” in order to identify and analyze the tensions inherent in the bio-icons she studies. On the one hand, she sees the popular as synonymous with “the people” constituted and unified through symbolic signification, usually for the benefit of hegemonic forces (pp. 20–21). On the other hand, Ghosh draws upon subaltern studies, but emphasizes visual culture as a prominent site of subaltern resistance. When disparate social groups consume iconic images, they read them from their own circumstances. Ghosh also emphasizes the icon's epistemology and ontology. Epistemology allows Ghosh to inquire into the framing of icons, which transforms them into easily recognizable signs. She refers to the symbolic “density” to highlight the multiple meanings codified within the sign. A focus on ontology allows Ghosh to interpret the ways in which iconic images motivate particular sensory and affective feelings that help to link the viewer to a larger public with common aspirations.
In the case of Mother Teresa, Ghosh emphasizes the struggle between the Vatican and the city of Kolkata to have the icon represent two different global aspirations. The Vatican wants Mother Teresa to signify the universal model of “charity,” while the city of Kolkata wants her to represent the local civic community as a cosmopolitan space open to all. Ghosh traces this tension as it developed through the canonization process, especially with regard to the miracle necessary for the beatification process to occur. Beatification “re-territorializes” her into a European domain, as the face of a compassionate Roman Catholic Church. This “official” recognition of her sainthood de-territorialized her saintliness, which was well established and recognized in Kolkata (pp. 121–31).
The struggle between the Vatican and the municipality is also present in the logistics of her funeral. The concern with the deceased body of Mother Teresa is significant for Ghosh because of her concern with embodiment. The body of Phoolan Devi, after her death, is similarly a site of controversy. Ghosh analyzes in detail the struggle over who will control Devi's deceased body, her financial assets, and her legacy. This conflict is compounded by the caste and political dynamics that shaped Devi's life and rise to prominence as “a spokesperson for ‘minorities’ in the Indian democracy” (p. 132). With all of the fights that took place over Devi's body and assets, Ghosh asserts, “She seemed not to belong to any single kinship structure or caste affiliation” (p. 134).
After the acclaim she received for her first novel, the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy turned her attention to social and environmental causes, most prominently the campaign to stop the construction of the Narmada Dam. Roy's international celebrity gave her access to a global audience, and she “could be depended on to render a complex and unfamiliar local struggle in the global South intelligible to transnational publics through her actions and speech acts” (p. 113). In doing this, she became the “face” of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, displacing the established leaders of a movement with a lengthy history.
The book will be of interest to scholars interested in media and cultural studies, and those interested in the ways in which iconic images become means for social groups to assert their aspirations.
