The Smile of Mona Lisa: Postcolonial Desires, Nationalist Families, and the Birth of Consumer Television in India

Transnational Feminism and Communication Studies

“…Zacharias (2003) examines how in the context of an emerging global market in India, where the Indian consumer is being recoded through a technologically driven modernity and being positioned as a global consumer, decontextualized images of white women, 262 R. Shome or whitened bodies-for example, she focuses on the image of the Mona Lisa-are often utilized by Indian advertising campaigns to market products to an upwardly mobile "sophisticated" consumer who is articulated in such texts through the logic of the "modern" and the "sophisticated." Zacharias' study illustrates a reversal of the colonizer logic of whiteness and raises important issues about the ways in which images of white femininity are being used in local/national contexts in many "developing"/nonwestern nations to shore up new national (and consumerist) subjectivities.…”

“…iconic images of western women in nonwestern contexts are utilized to shore up "modern" national (consumerist) subjectivities in which these images become saturated with local inflections (Zacharias, 2003). Taken together, these works illuminate a central theoretical impulse that informs transnational feminist interrogations of "audience."…”

Popular Communication After Globalization

“…(We note the paradox of leftist academics engrossed in the deconstruction of the globalization and commercialization that make their efforts possible-this dragon grows the tail it eats.) Using national communication studies journals as an index of trends, the objects of popular culture are being examined, increasingly, in terms of their global circulation (e.g., DeLuca & Peeples, 2002;Shome & Hegde, 2002a;Zacharias, 2003). The most popular approaches are drawing from, and contributing to, postcolonial theory (e.g., Kraidy, 2002;Parameswaran, 2002;Shome & Hedge, 2002), feminist and queer theory (e.g., Brookey & Westerfelhaus, 2002;Cooper, 2002;Herman, 2003;Shugart, 2003), media ecology (with a renewed interest in McLuhan and Baudrillard; e.g., Brummett, 2003;Rufo, 2003), and public sphere theory (particularly in terms of "counterpublics"; e.g., Asen, 2000;Greene, 2002;Owens & Palmer, 2003;Squires, 2002;Warner, 2002).…”

Reading the Visual, Tracking the Global: Postcolonial Feminist Methodology and the Chameleon Codes of Resistance

“…Postcolonial feminism originated in the humanities, primarily in literary theory and criticism; however, its more recent migrations to cultural studies and the social sciences has expanded the field's scope of inquiry to include global and national consumer and popular culture, newspaper and advertising texts, Internet communities, media audiences, and global marketing and corporate practices (Fernandes, 2000;Grewal, 1999;Mallapragada, 2005;Mankekar, 1999;Munshi, 1998;Oza, 2001;Parameswaran, 2002;Shome & Hegde, 2002;Zacharias, 2003). Postcolonial feminism's methodology, although hard to pin down in its varied interdisciplinary formations, has a foundational mission to historicize the normativetaken-for-granted and axiomatic-assumptions we make about our contemporary conditions of modernity and postmodernity.…”