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...
