Consumerist Encounters: Flirting with Things and Images [Hardcover]

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.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.List of ImagesPrefaceAcknowledgementIntroducing the Interactions1. If Your Jeans are Original, How Come Everyone Else has One? : Representation of Exclusionary Attitudes in Advertisements2. Discovering Lineage amidst Urban Anonymity: Role-Playing through Images of Things3. Peer-Reviewed Images: Image Consuming Selves as Visual Commodities4. Till it Lasts the Wash: Attached Messages, Detached Consumers, and the Trajectory of T-shirt5. Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost: Accounts of an l³!