Introducing the Intersections

Abstract

A commodity and its images occupy the centre stage in this book. I interrogate a range of commodities used in our day-to-day lives, not exotic objects belonging to a distant community. These are images we are familiar with and impressions that we flirt with. These are not commodities from the distant past, but things from our proximate consumerist present. In this book, I reflect on some these items of consumption and their images, and argue how our relationship with both has fundamentally transformed in the last few decades. I also build a case for an integrated model of analysis that rests on convergence of material and visual entities on popular registers of representation. My reading of these commodities and their images attempts to acknowledge the interrelationships between the materiality of a commodity and its visual manifestations. I situate my work at the intersection of the material and the visual in the popular realm and draw constant connections between a commodity’s material form, its visual manifestation, and its ...